Writing about an elusive yet encompassing topic: environmental catastrophe and our role in it Guest Post by Christopher Schaberg I’ve written a strange book about contemporary environmental awareness. It all started about seven years ago, when I thought I might write a book about Michigan. I wanted to write a book that reflected on my… Read More »
Guest post by Christopher Schaberg I wrote a good portion of The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth when I was up in Michigan in 2016-2017, on sabbatical from my full-time teaching position. I’m back up here now for a few weeks, recharging in anticipation of the academic year ahead. Something about the… Read More »
Guest post by Christopher Schaberg This month my third book about airports will be published. It’s called Airportness: The Nature of Flight. When I tell my friends and colleagues about this book, they often say something like, “Another book about airports?” A more generous way to look at it is that it is a trilogy… Read More »
Now more than ever, we need smart writing for broad audiences. Since we launched Object Lessons in 2013, we’ve been delighted by the overwhelming interest in our books and essays. This “crossover” approach to smart writing for a general audience has proved to be an appealing alternative for a range of authors, and the final… Read More »
My book The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight is now out in paperback, beautifully rebranded under the Bloomsbury imprint, and there have been some nice reviews to coincide with the release of the new affordable edition. In a few cases, readers have sent me photos of the book being read at… Read More »
We’re mad keen on Americana and Mad Men! Now that Series Five is about to hit the airwaves with a double episode in the US on March 25th & in the UK on March 27th, we’ve decided to compile a reading list for the show – books that we think say something about the characters, the show… Read More »
Day 5 of our photo blog 'Claiming baggage is also a psychological diagnosis of sorts; it is something we say when we seek to displace accountability: “He has a lot of baggage.” This trope was famously literalized in the opening credit scenes of Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate. In many ways, the entire fi m… Read More »
Day 4 of our photo blog 'If screening hinges on pleasure, this in no way means that screening practices are superfluous. Indeed, even at their most pleasurable and seemingly distracting, screens are functional apparatus, administering and facilitating the everyday operations of airports. For instance, Gillian Fuller helpfully outlines the screening function of airport windows in her… Read More »
Day 3 of our photo blog Alain de Botton describing the baggage claim in A Week at the Airport: “. . . in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred to formulate hopeful plans for the future… Read More »
Day 2 of our photo blog The next instalment in our Airports photo week takes us into the advertising world… “Pick a nice spot for your library” (© 2006 Sony Electronics Inc.) ‘In 2006 Sony ran an ad for the Reader (an early e-reading device, to be followed by the more successful Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad,… Read More »