This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Shemot Exodus 1:1 – 6:1 Spartanburg, SC Dear friends, The winter of Operation Cast Lead—when Israel invaded Gaza, killing well over…
Archive for April, 2020
Slow Burn, Quarantine Edition
Book of Exodus
Penguin Random House, Co-opted Values, and Contemporary Cli-Fi
The last several decades have seen a remarkable turn toward cli-fi: novels and stories that imagine in various ways and seek to raise the alarm for the consequences of catastrophic…
The Many Books of the Future: Print-digital Literatures
I have been researching hybrid print-digital literary works for a few years now, which means I have given a fair amount of talks about them too. The discussions following these…
10 MYTHS ABOUT DIGITAL LITERARY CULTURE
Predictions have an uncanny tendency to come true, just not in the way predicted. Take the early 1990s mantra of “the death of the book” — the existentially-laden theme of…
America’s Next Top Novel
Despite the fact that there are more books published annually than ever before; despite claims that the commercial publishing industry has sacrificed all pretenses of quality to churn out marketable…
Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy
In The Nature of the Book, his landmark study of the printing industry in early modern London, Adrian Johns delivers a rich recreation of what it would have been like…
Megativity and Miniaturization at the Frankfurt Book Fair
The Frankfurt Book Fair, or in its native German, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, restarted in the aftermath of the Second World War as a symbol of post-war reconstruction, an engine of…
Introduction to Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing
Right about now, you might be thinking: “not more neoliberalism!” Come to think of it, you might be getting a little tired of “ecologies” too. But pulling together these two…