Literary Nonfiction. George Guida’s Spectacles of Themselves is a brilliant survey that reflects the workings of a subtle mind with a keen eye for the minutiae of expression in a charged field. He explains the dynamics of many levels of linguistic interference, and he shows how writers use style to create characters for themselves. He is able to compare fruitfully the manners of very different essayists and writers in order to shed light on the varieties and possibilities of expression available to writers who have relations with more than one language and culture.– Robert Viscusi, author of Buried Caesars and Other Stories of Italian American Writing