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Published Aug 2020
272 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age's media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world's ills.
We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase "Did you see?" The feeling that we're living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten―and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last.
The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end―if indeed it will―and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.
Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world.
"[A] kind of literary road map to our tumultuous era...The idea here—as in all the essays in this nuanced book—is that consciousness is conditional, and we can understand ourselves only in pieces. A fine collection from a poet who seems equally comfortable in prose." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[D]eeply contemplative...Whatever the chosen topic, Gabbert's essays manage to be by turns poetic, philosophical, and exhaustively researched. This is a superb collection." - Publishers Weekly
"Elisa Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory is one of those joyful books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read...[T]he book somehow manages to be a germane contribution to today's—and tomorrow's—conversations while still existing as an uneasy cultural artifact of a time just recently past. - Robin Jones, The Paris Review (staff pick)
"Searing...In shattering essays, Gabbert explores if and how and why certain threats register more than others, and how even seemingly immutable facts are subject to spin from our imprecise recollections. There's a chapter on pandemics, and yes, it is chilling." - Vulture
"These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can't stop fantasizing about it." - The Rumpus
"If it seems that the world is falling apart, and you think you might be losing your mind, this book is here to reassure you: it is, and you are. There can be no better companion in these bewildering times than the crystalline mind of Elisa Gabbert; she delivers the bad news with the ardor of an aria and the rigor of a clinical trial." - J. Robert Lennon, author of Broken River
"Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do—cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel—and how can you not—as if your emotional endurance is exhausted by horrors already well underway? Then you should read this book." - Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians
This information about The Unreality of Memory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections L'Heure Bleue, The Self Unstable, and The French Exit. Her debut collection of essays, The Word Pretty, was published in 2018. The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Boston Review, the Paris Review Daily, Pacific Standard, Guernica, the Awl, Electric Literature, the Harvard Review, and many other venues. She lives in Denver.
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