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discussing a book one has not read with someone equally unfamiliar with it. Despite appearances, Bayard’s volume is not a self-help book or a bluffer’s guide to great literature, but instead serves to warn people not to try to impress others with how much they have read. The truth is, most of the time they’re fibbing and there are many gradations between total reading and complete non-reading, he declares, including hearing about a book, skimming it and forgetting its contents. A little too much impenetrable psychoanalytic jargon sometimes threatens to overwhelm Bayard’s argument, but Bayard’s at least partly tongue-in-cheek argument about not reading is well worth reading.”
    —Publishers Weekly
    “In this hilarious and elaborate spoof, Bayard proves once again that being almost ridiculously erudite and screamingly funny are by no means mutually exclusive. In grand Swiftian style, the author offers a staunch pseudo defense of the art of what he calls ‘non-reading,’ in which one must claim as all but divine the right to hold forth about books that one has skimmed, forgotten, or failed to read at all. With tongue firmly in cheek, he argues that it’s more than enough—indeed, preferable in virtually all respects—to be familiar with a book’s reputation and in particular to understand its place in the bibliographic pecking order. What percentage of commentators, after all, has actually read Proust’s novel? Paul Valery certainly hadn’t, as Bayard notes, but it didn’t stop him from discoursing upon it at length. There’s a whiff of the gleeful perversity of French deconstruction theory here, but the book’s true angel is Oscar Wilde, whose witticism provides Bayard with a mock rallying cry: ‘I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.’ ”
    —Booklist
    “I read and adored Pierre Bayard’s book. It’s funny, smart, and so true— a wonderful combination of slick French philosophizing and tongue-in-cheek wit, and an honest appraisal of what it means, or doesn’t mean, to read.”
    —Clare Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children
    “A survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes . . . evidently much in need.”
    —New York Times
    “With rare humor, Bayard liberally rethinks the social use [of literature] and the position of the reader . . . Read or skim How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read . Or simply listen to what people say about it so that you can talk about it with ease. In either case, you may not be able to forget it.”
    —Les Inrockuptibles
    “Booksellers are familiar with the baffling yet flattering assumption on the part of some customers that they’ve read every book in the store. Why ruin the illusion? This brilliant, vibrant, and hilarious book asserts that knowing where a book is situated in the larger world of literature, knowing people’s reactions to it, and just plain shamelessness are all you need. Bayard (who happens to be a professor of French literature at the University of Paris) clearly values reading, but less typically he also values gut reactions, improvisation, and uninformed opinions. He sees talking about books as a way of expressing yourself and your ‘inner book.’ I joyfully read every word of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read , and yet will never feel obligated to do so to any other book again!”
    —Audrey Brockhaus, Schuler Books & Music Okemos

Copyright © 2007 Les Editions de Minuit
English translation copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Mehlman
Foreword copyright © 2007 by Francine Prose
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
    Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATAM
    Bayard, Pierre, 1954–
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