Reading heroines and heroes have populated literature and arts since the second half of the eighteenth century. In the modern media society, reading culture is once again in a state of upheaval, and book reading presents itself as an excellent field for reflecting on the cultural technique of reading and its evolution through history. Besides the current superficial modes of reading, for example picking out small chunks of information and parallel reading of several books as a response to the growing flood of information, there are also literature and arts that move in the opposite direction and highlight the intensive reading experience. For example, Peter Handke’s protagonists in his novel Der Bildverlust (2002) read “spelling, silently moving their lips...”. The high intensity of reading, the deliberateness with which the text is approached, heighten the perception of the act of reading. In artists’ performances, attention is focused on the reading scene through the choice of the place of reading, the gesture of reading, the change in the rhythm of reading until it stops, and the composition of the book itself (Marta Minujín’s living constructions with forbidden books, 1983, 2017). In artistic book objects, the narrativity consists in the haptics of the object and serves as a performance score for both the artist and the audience.

This issue of International Journal of Literature and Arts aims to provide current insights into the subject of reading that are worthy of further exploration or discovery, for example, through reflections on the following points: