Chelsea House has a new series of reference works aimed at the secondary-ed and undergraduate markets. Called “Bloom’s Classical Critical Views,” they publish contemporary perspectives on 19thC writers (i.e., reviews that are out of copyright). For each review, the volume editor provides a brief headnote indicating who the person was, and, for longer pieces, why a modern student might find the review helpful.
My contribution to this series is a volume on Charles Dickens, out in the past two weeks or so. Amusingly, the Amazon.com “search inside this book” feature actually offers up a search of Bloom’s *Modern* Critical Views, an altogether different thing.
(Actual question posed by a colleague from outside the department: “What was it like working with Harold Bloom?” [English-types familiar with the Bloom industry will recognize why that’s funny.])