Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle's latest prose publication The Book.

True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle's legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) 'the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.' With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle's prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. 'It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,' she writes. 'Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?'

In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

'Straightforward in form, comic and companionable in tone, blessed with the Martian gift of seeing the strange in the ordinary and vice-versa... ' - Joel Brouwer, Poetry

'Ruefle's speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us.' - Adrien Blevins, Ploughshares