This collection of 5 dozen pieces of literary criticism was published in the Washington Post between March 2003 and January 2010. It is a collection of Yardley's opinions of books that he believes are worthy of a second look. They scan the realms of fiction, biography and autobiography, memoirs, and history.

"This book analyzes the role of Irishness in the nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Centering the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, it asks how the seemingly liberationist politics of many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers could fail to comprehend the ethical necessity of opposing both race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and...

"Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction-above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea-that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica,...

Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions and thrown the nation's struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak...

"When Henry Vizetelly was imprisoned in 1889 for publishing the novels of Émile Zola in English, the problem was not just Zola's French candour about sex--it was that Vizetelly's books were cheap, and ordinary people could read them. Censored exposes the role that power plays in censorship. In twenty-five chapters focusing on a wide range of texts, including the Bible, slave narratives, modernist classics, comic books, and Chicana/o literature, Matthew...