The Literary Cyclist: Great Bicycling Scenes in Literature

All the best prose and poetry on cycling. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155821562X
• ISBN13: 9781558215627
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Breakaway Books
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Old favorite, new cover

This book used to be titled "The Noiseless Tenor", but in this newer edition it has been retitled and given a few extra editorial words. This is a wide-ranging survey of references to the bicycle in mostly-20th-Century works; sometimes the reference is a stretch and Starrs points this fact out. Occasionally he has to piece together fragments of a scene to make the bicycling reference clear. Starrs' piecework is always in italic type -- and occasionally I wondered if he'd ever get to the author's words. But this collection is well-done, and Starrs obviously loves everything to do with the bicycle. His children show up occasionally (mostly in the form of recollections from a cross-country tour while they were growing up), and his own experience influenced the selection. Everything from Ernest Hemingway's flat observational prose to a truly fantastical five-rider cross-country race (against a locomotive) is fair game here, and this book suits its stated purpose of being a volume that can be stashed in the thinking cycle tourist's pannier.