The strength of [Mere Reading] lies in its penetrating and poignant descriptions of important works of late modernist fiction that resist description ... Mere Reading not only persuasively argues for slow reading, but also demonstrates the critical value of this praxis through eloquent and insightful readings of several major novels.
Journal of Modern Literature
Mitchell's readings ... Read moreoffer an accomplished and refreshing approach to literary works.
Textual Practice
In a career-long recoil from an early, maternally-induced, and short-lived brush with Evelyn Woods' speed reading techniques, Lee Clark Mitchell has slackened the velocity, which is only to say tightened the grip, of his textual habits ever since-and the yield, as in two engrossing and indispensable chapters on Cormac McCarthy, is sampled here in readings that neither hydroplane across the surface of the literary page, nor approach it in programmatic slow-mo, but that let a deliberately wide variety of stylistic traction and density pace the ear of reading and test the very possibilities of attention. Unostentatiously termed 'mere' (as in 'simply') reading, the results are instead, in their deployment of seasoned gifts, an intense and exemplary case of sheer reading.
Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading (2015)
Remember how it felt to read books when you were a child? The privacy, the concentration, the wonder? At a time when, given the challenges of new media, novels are called upon to be more merely useful than ever before, Lee Mitchell argues that prose ought to be read at least as closely as poetry-every turn of syntax or figure a source of inexhaustible revelation. Not by regressing but by pushing us forward into ever more gratifyingly attentive modes of reading, Mere Reading restores us to a more truly purposeful bliss.
James Longenbach, Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, University of Rochester, USA, and author of The Virtues of Poetry (2013)
Mere Reading sparkles with quicksilver insights that wait around every bend of Lee Mitchell's argument. He focuses less on what readers extract from literature and more on what they experience there. He is particularly attuned to the ways in which great stylists, from Willa Cather to Cormac McCarthy, make us, in Hemingway's words, feel something more than we understand it. Mitchell continually reminds us that what we find in the best American fiction is far messier, fresher and more puzzling than most critics are willing to admit.
Michael Kowalewski, Lloyd McBride Professor of English & Environmental Studies, Carleton College, USA
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