Sven Birkerts

A reissue of the book that first examined the future of reading and literature in the electronic age, now with a new introduction and Afterword In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture? Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer is an alarming yes. In The Gutenberg Elegies, he explores the impact of technology on the experience of reading. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life. What does it mean to "hear" a book on audiotape or decipher its words in electronic form on a laptop screen? Can the world created by Henry James exist in an era defined by the work of Bill Gates? Are books as we know them—volumes printed in ink on paper, with pages to be turned as the reading of each page is completed—dead? At once a celebration of the complex pleasures of reading and a bold challenge to the information technologies of today and tomorrow, The Gutenberg Elegies is an essential volume for anyone who cares about the past and the future of books.

The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

The Gutenberg Elegies

Birkerts "examines the changes that he has observed in himself and others [since allowing a degree of everyday digital technology into his life]: the distraction induced by reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of 'hive' behaviors. 'An unprecedented shift is underway,' he argues, and 'this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation.' He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and contemplates the countering energies available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are a threat to creativity"--Page 4 of cove

Art and Attention in the Internet Age

Changing the Subject

In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic, editor, and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. "Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times," Birkerts writes. But what makes one memoir memorable and another self-serving? What determines the difference between graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure? Birkerts argues that the memoirist's strategies for presenting the subjective experience of time reveal the power and resonance of the writer's life. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past, and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, how the work stirs to life our own sense of past and present."--BOOK JACKET.

Then, Again

The Art of Time in Memoir

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Joel Agee

This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence.

The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion

The Inspector Barlach Mysteries

Then, Again (Art Of...)

A critically acclaimed lament for the fate of reading in the electronic age shows how information technology is harming the inner lives of humans. Reprint. SLJ.

Donald Hall

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. This concise, lively text covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. Going beyond the basics of composition, the text teaches originality and elegance in writing encouraging students to develop their own written voice. Sample student papers including several works-in-progress - allow students to learn the writing process through the work of their peers. A brief handbook section rounds out the coverage.

Writing Well

One of the pivotal critics of our times champions the creative spirit in an age of intense distraction, tackling such subjects as manufactured nostalgia and commercialism.

Readings

Discusses Max Frisch, Heinrich Boll, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Blaise Cendrars, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco, Malcolm Lowry, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Cyril Connolly

Essays on 20-century Literature

An Artificial Wilderness

One of the nation's great literary critics shares memories of growing up as an outcast in suburban Detroit, reaching deep back into his own family's history to paint a portrait of a life lived as an outsider in America.

Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time

My Sky Blue Trades

From getting topic ideas to revising the final draft, this classic resource teaches the basics of writing. A comprehensive rhetoric with a handbook section provides all the needed coverage in one brief text, and suggested writing assignments offer practice in writing with the reader in mind.

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Essays on Modern Poetry

The Electric Life

Sven Birkerts explores the impacts of two world wars and the collapse of the assumption of Humanism on a diverse group of modern writers, bringing to light the aspect of a world literature promoting an international perspective. Photographs.

Essays on 20th-century Literature

This anthology aims to bring an awareness of how the world of fiction, poetry and drama is expanding in a multicultural, global and electronic environment. Authors represented include a high proportion of women as well as writers from non-Western cultures and from a variety of American cultural traditions. For in-depth reading, career study sections in fiction and poetry focus on the work of James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich, while the drama section includes two plays by Sophocles, as well as Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Tempest. In all, the text includes 46 short stories, 14 plays and 345 poems.

The Evolving Canon

Literature

Other Walk is a series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country's foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms. In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son's frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed. But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children's independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

Essays

The Other Walk

One of the most acclaimed authors on the meaning of reading and writing takes on Nabokov's classic memoir.

Bookmarked

Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, "Writing Well," is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. This concise, lively text covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. Going beyond the basics of composition, the text teaches originality and elegance in writing encouraging students to develop their own written voice. Sample student papers including several works-in-progress - allow students to learn the writing process through the work of their peers. A brief handbook section rounds out the coverage.

Sven Birkerts

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