The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories: The Journal Non/Fiction Prize
Autor Miles Harveyen Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 aug 2024
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.” Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259146
ISBN-10: 0814259146
Pagini: 200
Ilustrații: 9 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Non/Fiction Prize
ISBN-10: 0814259146
Pagini: 200
Ilustrații: 9 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Non/Fiction Prize
Recenzii
"Harvey is prized for his exceptionally vivid narrative nonfiction… Here he brings astute observations and fluency in the unexpected to a book of imaginatively linked, mythic short stories lustrous with unruly passion, strange impulses, untenable loss, and the dogged pursuit of solace. … Harvey has created an intricately spun, deeply illuminating web of wondrously uncanny and compassionate stories." - Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"This astonishingly beautiful book of interlocking stories has at its center things and people that are about to disappear. Sometimes what has been lost, however, can be recovered. It is as if all these stories compose one large story, an emotional journey of the lost and found. It should be read from beginning to end—people and things, such as a barber pole, migrate from one story to another. A wonderful book." —Charles Baxter
"By turns wry, heartbreaking, funny, and grief-haunted, these deceptively clear stories interlock to reveal wonderful depths, objects embodying the characters’ loves and losses diving below the waters only to resurface transformed. A beguiling read." —Andrea Barrett
"Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Miles Harvey plucks mysterious coins from cobblestones, a sphere from the sea, a dusty postcard from a not-quite-empty house. In this beautiful collection, both lives and objects glow, with the light and weight of choices and longings that echo across stories, relationships, years." —Caitlin Horrocks
"The Registry of Forgotten Objects sated an appetite I hadn’t realized I had. Harvey’s fable-like stories conjure a world full of doors and subtle connections, a place both familiar and endlessly surprising. In our uncertain times, this book offers a powerful and necessary reminder that not only fear but also beauty resides in what is strange and unknown. This linked collection is masterful—one I’ll return to again and again." —V. V. Ganeshananthan
Notă biografică
Miles Harvey is the author of The King of Confidence (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection), Painter in a Savage Land, and The Island of Lost Maps. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher. The Registry of Forgotten Objects is his first work of fiction.
Extras
Some people theorize the place was built as a storage facility for aeroplanes or dirigibles, machines that, if the old stories are to be believed, once flew above the earth. Others insist it was used for the making of motion pictures, another lost technology, in which human beings somehow transformed themselves into figures of light and danced on giant white walls in front of audiences. Still others postulate it was a temple for some vanished religion. In the end, however, the only thing certain about the building that houses the Registry of Forgotten Objects is that its original purpose has disappeared from history, just like those of the artifacts inside.
Objects made of wood. Objects made of steel, iron, tin, lead, or other metals. Objects made of glass, pottery, or plastic. Objects made of feathers. Objects made of unclassifiable materials. Objects made of pulleys, gears, chains, springs, switches, dials, valves, pumps, and innumerable components that no longer possess a name. Much of the Registry’s holdings are from the Mechanical Age and the Electrical Age, but the collection also contains countless artifacts from the Great Forgetting, that cataclysmic period when certain machines, now extinct, are said to have subsumed all human knowledge. The relics that survive—keyboards, screens, and small wafers of semiconductor material—are as mysterious as they are mundane. How these apparatuses worked, and what became of the data they hoarded away, is lost to time.
The Registry is surrounded by nine immense rings of barbed wire, arranged in a spiraling sequence that impels prospective patrons toward the front gate. If it could be seen from above, the long line of applicants for admission would resemble the countless coiled snakes that sun themselves in this arid terrain. The first person in line is a gaunt woman with sunken eyes and a heavy satchel over her shoulder. The second person is an old man cradling a cylindrical object in his arms. Although they’ve spent many days standing side by side, many nights listening to each other’s fitful sleep, the two strangers rarely exchange words, in part because they come from such disparate regions that they do not speak the same dialect, and in part because there is so little to say. Like everyone here, they have the same hope, the same all-consuming dream: entry. Although the man and woman bear no resemblance, their expressions have merged during the long wait into a common look of fatigue, boredom, and intense anticipation—one they share with the third person in line, the fourth, the hundredth, the thousandth, the ten thousandth.
The Registry itself, which stretches across this rock-strewn landscape for hundreds of yards, is an arched building of crumbling concrete, shaped like a tube sliced lengthwise in half. At one end rises a great semicircular wall of translucent glass, three hundred feet tall at its highest point, which allows archivists and researchers to work without candles on all but the most overcast days. At the other end—an expansive part of the Registry, off-limits to the public—there’s only darkness. Running the length of the building on either side, one hundred feet above ground level, are rows of porthole windows, two lines of dimly lit dots that converge but never connect before they fade into the distance, giving patrons the impression of staring into an infinite tunnel. From the front of the line, the gaunt woman and the old man can make out these endless columns of light through the massive glass doors. Attempting to trace them to their vanishing point, the woman thinks of a future without hunger, fear, or want. The man thinks of a past, stretching on and on behind him before disappearing into that black place where memory begins. He does not measure time in weeks or months or years, concepts he knows nothing about, but in the tired faces of people he has come across in his travels, tired faces like that of the woman in front of him, glimpsed in passing, blurring into one another, nameless figures from some dream. Nothing is solid except the cylindrical object in his arms, which he feels sure is of ancient origin. It alone makes the past seem substantial.
Objects made of wood. Objects made of steel, iron, tin, lead, or other metals. Objects made of glass, pottery, or plastic. Objects made of feathers. Objects made of unclassifiable materials. Objects made of pulleys, gears, chains, springs, switches, dials, valves, pumps, and innumerable components that no longer possess a name. Much of the Registry’s holdings are from the Mechanical Age and the Electrical Age, but the collection also contains countless artifacts from the Great Forgetting, that cataclysmic period when certain machines, now extinct, are said to have subsumed all human knowledge. The relics that survive—keyboards, screens, and small wafers of semiconductor material—are as mysterious as they are mundane. How these apparatuses worked, and what became of the data they hoarded away, is lost to time.
The Registry is surrounded by nine immense rings of barbed wire, arranged in a spiraling sequence that impels prospective patrons toward the front gate. If it could be seen from above, the long line of applicants for admission would resemble the countless coiled snakes that sun themselves in this arid terrain. The first person in line is a gaunt woman with sunken eyes and a heavy satchel over her shoulder. The second person is an old man cradling a cylindrical object in his arms. Although they’ve spent many days standing side by side, many nights listening to each other’s fitful sleep, the two strangers rarely exchange words, in part because they come from such disparate regions that they do not speak the same dialect, and in part because there is so little to say. Like everyone here, they have the same hope, the same all-consuming dream: entry. Although the man and woman bear no resemblance, their expressions have merged during the long wait into a common look of fatigue, boredom, and intense anticipation—one they share with the third person in line, the fourth, the hundredth, the thousandth, the ten thousandth.
The Registry itself, which stretches across this rock-strewn landscape for hundreds of yards, is an arched building of crumbling concrete, shaped like a tube sliced lengthwise in half. At one end rises a great semicircular wall of translucent glass, three hundred feet tall at its highest point, which allows archivists and researchers to work without candles on all but the most overcast days. At the other end—an expansive part of the Registry, off-limits to the public—there’s only darkness. Running the length of the building on either side, one hundred feet above ground level, are rows of porthole windows, two lines of dimly lit dots that converge but never connect before they fade into the distance, giving patrons the impression of staring into an infinite tunnel. From the front of the line, the gaunt woman and the old man can make out these endless columns of light through the massive glass doors. Attempting to trace them to their vanishing point, the woman thinks of a future without hunger, fear, or want. The man thinks of a past, stretching on and on behind him before disappearing into that black place where memory begins. He does not measure time in weeks or months or years, concepts he knows nothing about, but in the tired faces of people he has come across in his travels, tired faces like that of the woman in front of him, glimpsed in passing, blurring into one another, nameless figures from some dream. Nothing is solid except the cylindrical object in his arms, which he feels sure is of ancient origin. It alone makes the past seem substantial.
Cuprins
The Drought Beachcombers in Doggerland The Man Who Slept with Eudora Welty Postcard from a Funeral, Cumberland, Maryland, October 10, 1975 The Complete Miracles of St. Anthony: Definitive Edition with Previously Unpublished Material Why I Married My Wife The Master of Patina Four Faces The Pied Piper of Fuckit Balm of Life Song of Remembrance The Registry of Forgotten Objects Acknowledgments
Descriere
Short stories that use inanimate objects and how humans relate to them to examine grief, environmental disaster, and other themes of contemporary life.