In The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart's "episodes in verbal attention" track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording.

Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious.

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He is author of seventeen previous books, including The Deed of Reading, The One, Other, and Only Dickens, and Book, Text, Medium.

Stewart is clearly having fun in this book, channeling techniques into his exposition with such parings as word's way and world's way, touchstone and touchtone, density and intensity, and epiphony and epiphany, to note just a few. Impressively erudite, this work will interest critics, creative writers, and literary-minded linguists.

Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia, author of Epic:

The Ways of the Word is brilliant, idiosyncratic, and relentless. It is a book that demands to be read slowly and that will be read with great pleasure. On every page, Stewart's theme is clear—that the literary experience is constitutively creative for writers and readers alike, all the way down to the intimate components and differentials of the linguistic medium itself.

Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University, author of Romantic Shades and Shadows:

Beautifully written, witty, and illuminating, The Ways of the Word tracks language in the literary mode to show how attention to words as events opens up new routes in reading. Garrett Stewart delivers a dazzling, erudite, accessibly adventurous guide on how to read this way. The momentum and seductive force keep one reading, rereading—and soon playing along.