
The
thrill and anxiety of the Uncanny is the engine of this debut
collection by rare book librarian and cultural critic Matthew Battles.
He invents a new Creole, one that combines the baroque grandiosity of
19th century industrialist with the sleek grandiosity of the 21st
technologist. Traversing musty libraries and austere technology
conferences, Battles quietly but ruthlessly discloses the beauty and
grotesquerie of our present times, our infatuation with the New and our
nostalgia for the Old both lovingly depicted and then slowly roasted on
the spit.
In
"The Dogs in the Trees," man's best friends deliver an enigmatic
rebuke. The protagonist of "The Sovereignties of Invention" is
enthralled by a gadget that plumbs the depths of the stream of
consciousness. In "The Manuscript of Belz," a librarian ponders the
glamor of the book and the bloody limits of cultural experience. And
"the Gnomon" seeks in Internet culture the same dark energies limned by
Poe.
Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History,
which explores the idea of the library in different times and places.
With Joshua Glenn he founded HiLobrow.com in 2009. At present he is a
program fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
where he works for metaLAB, a research and design group investigating
the arts and humanities in a time of networks.




