After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favourites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn't like, guilty pleasures. On Rereading records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

"Focusing on some of the best known characters in all of literature - chosen to trace the arc from childhood to old age - a brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature shows how our inner lives become at once stranger and more familiar when seen through the prism of fiction. In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual profession, Josh Cohen illuminates a new way to understand ourselves. He helps us see what...

"Based on contemporary psychological research, The Science of Writing Characters provides writers with a completely new way of developing compelling and psychologically-credible fictional characters"--