Literary Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature (Skyhorse Publishing), by Alex Palmer

­The novels of Jane Austen and other authors of that time period were denounced by the era's cultural elite, including poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who claimed that reading their work "occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind." That's only one of hundreds of fascinating morsels in Literary Miscellany, a brightly written gallery of bits concerning writers, the written word and the publishing business. Calling Henry David Thoreau's Walden the first "stunt memoir," Alex Palmer maintains a slightly cheeky yet always informative tone throughout. It's a great compendium of smart-sounding conversation starters.