Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: Literature allows us to become someone else.

Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages.

Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person— and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought.