Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an assistant professor of English at Yale University. The coeditor of The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), she is currently working on a book manuscript on the history of the unread book in late 19th- and early 20th-century South Asia.