I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I devoured this book in a day, and it has kept me thinking for years. Say you can buy a stuffed animal equipped with a camera, and an anonymous user somewhere on the planet can see through that camera, move the toy, and make a rudimentary noise. What could possibly go wrong?
I was fascinated by the range of stories Schweblin imagines: fun, sweet, silly, and absolutely awful. Why can’t people in Silicon Valley think outside the box like this before they release the latest gadget that’s supposed to make our lives better?
A visionary novel about our interconnected world, about the collision of horror and humanity, from the Man Booker-shortlisted master of the spine-tingling tale
A Guardian & Observer Best Fiction Book of 2020 * A Sunday Times Best Science Fiction Book of the Year * The Times Best Science Fiction Books of the Year * NPR Best Books of the Year
World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020 * Ebook Travel Guides Best 5 Books of 2020 * A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
They're not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in…
I’ve tried my hand at street poetry with a typewriter and been surprised by the hugs and tears my little efforts sometimes provoke. This book shows me why: people are hungry for someone to listen and care. And something about a mechanical intermediary promotes attention, while digital tech pushes us apart.
I was absorbed by Sonia-Wallace’s stories and jealous of his chance to be Amtrak’s writer-in-residence, typing poems on a train across America.
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are.
Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.…
This book is a literary travelogue of the turbulent North African country of Libya, as seen through the eyes of 17 Libyan short story writers and one American diplomat.
The author, Ethan Chorin, was one of the first American officials to be posted to Libya in the wake of the…
I could use some hope for the future, and this story by a polymath and “deindustrial” sci-fi writer made me hope. It’s an actual utopia, not the much more popular dystopian genre. Greer lets me imagine how a low-tech, 1950s-ish economy could provide a more sustainable and meaningful life for all. He makes sensible points that cut across our usual political divisions.
After reading Retrotopia, I walked through a 19th-century neighborhood in Cincinnati, admired the small businesses and streetcars, and felt that this is the way things ought to be.
FORWARD TO THE PAST The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes. Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a…
Birkerts’ essays make me beautifully sad and newly defiant. Like me, he’s an analog native living in a digital world who has felt his ability to concentrate on the written word erode over the years.
But boy, can he write: “Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another thin layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum.” To the typewriter, I go!
Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovation
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art―the very cultural activities that make us human. After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others―the distraction…
"Captain Charles Kennedy" parachuted into a moonlit Austrian forest and searched frantically for his lost radio set. His real name was Leo Hillman and he was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. He was going home. Men and women of Churchill’s secret Special Operations Executive worked to free Austria from Hitler's…
Sometimes, I’m in the mood for dystopias and want to imagine where the trends that Birkerts describes may take us. So I was pleasingly horrified by Shteyngart’s story of a near future where books are smelly embarrassments, people’s credit ratings are displayed on signs as they walk by, and Internet deprivation is grounds for suicide.
Oh, and I won’t be signing up for high-tech life extension procedures after seeing where that goes …
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus…
My book is a manifesto and field manual for people who are curious about the power of this technology today. It tells stories about writers, artists, and people of every age who are creating with typewriters as one way to resist the onslaught of digital tech, with its surveillance, distractions, and dependencies.
Topics include the history and future of typewriters, how to choose one, how to use it, and the artistic and social possibilities it opens up. There are photos, cartoons, art—even a bookmark that looks like a typewriter ribbon.
Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium’s resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers…
Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X").
Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety,…
