Book
Attention : dispatches from a land of distraction
Edition
First edition.
Publication Information
New York : Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2018]
Physical Description
xiii, 560 pages ; 24 cm
Uniform Title
Summary
A collection of essays, from a selection of previously published and new nonfiction--essays, memoir, criticism, letters, diaries--covering an array of topics.
Contents
- Distraction
- Home (It's a circle [on the closing of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus] ; From the diaries [Growling Day protests 2017] ; The last last summer [on Donald Trump and the fall of Atlantic City] ; Notes on the concession ; From the diaries [Lecture review ; Memoir] ; Exit Bernie ; From The diaries [New York signs ; Last exit for the Verazano-Narrows Bridge ; Yield ; Siamese connection ; LIRR ; R Trains run express ; Stop] Letter to Ruth Mary Rivers ; First family, second life [on Thomas Pynchon] ; Letterform, blandform ; From the diaries [Meditations] ; 9/11 blue ; From the diaries [Hat lessons from attending a film noir marathon with a nonagenerian ex-milliner who never stops talking] ; Letter to Stephen Shore ; Downtown underground [on John Zorn] ; From the diaries [Meditations from the gym] ; Editing the I [on Gordon Lish] ; From the diaries [Four facts I learned in a bar on Staten Island ; A successful man in Chicago is complimented on his suit] ; Lip service [on Aretha and Beyoncé] ; WIKI: what I know is ; Boundless informant [on Greenwald's Snowden] ; From the diaries [Salt and pepper shakers ; When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city] ; Datasexual [on Morozov, Lanier, Johnson and Google] ; From the diaries [Navajo Reservation ; Medium Thoreau])
- Abroad (Writing about the present [mirror, body, shadow] ; From the diaries [Brows ; Freckles] ; Zibaldone diary ; Źižek press junket ; From the diaries [Conversation summary (next table) ; Why I've never had sex in Hungary] ; No one hates him more [on Franzen's Kraus ] ; Recognized witness [on H.G. Adler] ; From the diaries [What kind of neighborhood is Palilula (Belgrade)? ; The Hague] ; Conducting mortality [on Henry-Louis de La Grange's Mahler ; Fencing for Hitler [on Helene Mayer] ; Speak easy [on Bohumil Hrabal] ; From the diaries [Museum fact (Rijeka) ; Critical typo] ; Hung like an obelisk, hard as an Olympian [an abecedarium of English language publishing in Paris] ; From the diaries [Sounds of Odessa ; Odessa fashion ; Odessa at work ; Odessa geography; London stumble] ; Pond memories [on Georges Perec ; Auto-flâneurism [on Tom McCarthy] ; From the diaries [The only Caravaggio in Rome ; My friend's estimation of his grandfather, a forgotten Hungarian painter] ; The death of culture, and other hypocrisises [on Mario Vargas Llosa] ; All poison, all abundance [on Florio's Montaigne, and Shakespeare's Florio] ; From the diaries [Sentences from an English-language workbook found in Sofia ; A phrase that must be, but is not, originally Yiddish] ; Inner syntax [on Eimear McBride] ; Inadvertence [on Alan Turing's centennial] ; Her own asylum [on Anna Kavan] ; From the diaries [American woman complimented by Greek man ; Bucharest hostel] ; Bibliothanates, or epigraphs for a last book)
- Dreamlands (Open sesame ; Me, U, Baku, Quba ; From the diaries [Adoration of new Magi ; Le Pont Mirabeau] ; On the transit of Toledo ; In partial disgrace [on Charles Newman] ; From the diaries [A certain angle ; The mind too ; A ; Posterity] ; Reorientalism [on Mathias Énard ] The literature of the two Easts ; From the diaries [Traveling] ; Israel diary ; Lines of occupation [On Yitzhak Laor] ; From the diaries [To think ; Traveling without you] ; Literary animals ; Top ten books about online ; From the diaries [What's in the bag?; Overnight flight WC ; Shooting] ; Impromptu fantasias [On Benjamin de Casseres] ; Paragraph for Liu Xiaobo ; From the diaries [There should be words for the following in German ; Germany to Jersey for the holidays] ; Thoughts on the Roths and their Kaddish ; Dream translations from the early Hasidic)
- Attention! A (short) history.