The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* 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 work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery." *--Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

The Unreality of Remembering & Other Essays, forthcoming in August 2020 from FSG Originals (available for presale now) and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010) are among Elisa Gabbert's five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. The Self Unstable was named one of the greatest novels of 2013 by the New Yorker, while The Word Beautiful was a New York Times Editors' Choice. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and a variety of other publications.