Maryanne Wolf
Author of
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins)
Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (Edited; York, 2001),
Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016, Oxford University Press)
Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins)
Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of
MaryanneWolf.com / Represented by Anne Edelstein
Books by Maryanne
Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins)
From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.
This book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums.
Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins)
Human beings were never born to read. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. Proust and the Squid chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts.
Lively, erudite, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy. The potential transformations in this changed reading brain, have profound implications for every child and for the intellectual development of our species.
PRAISE
“[Maryanne Wolf] displays extraordinary passion and perceptiveness concerning the reading brain, its miraculous achievements and tragic dysfunctions.” —BookForum
“Everything Wolf says makes sense....She clearly knows her stuff.” —Washington Post Book World
“Brilliant and eye-opening.” —Albany Times Union