Required Reading: MQR’s Issue on Bookishness

BOOKISHNESS: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age
Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2009

“We… live at a double moment: the death of the book and the dearth of reading face off against a proliferation of virtual books, the overabundance of writing. At such a time, everything seems up for grabs in ways both threatening and promising; it’s either a brave new world or Brave New World that confronts us… Without abandoning our sense of what is lost, we mustn’t lose the imagination of what is potentially—and increasingly, actually—to be gained…” — Jonathan Freedman, “Bookishness; A Brief Introduction”

Essays
Leah Price, “Reading As If for Life”
Alan Liu, “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing”
Phil Pochoda, “UP 2.0: Some Theses on the Future of Academic Publishing”
Jessica Pressman “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature”
Paul N. Courant, “New Institutions for the Digital Age”
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “The Taste of Mice”
Benjamin Busch, “Growth Rings”
David Kirby, “The Traveling Library”
Michael Wood, “Distraction Theory: How to Read While Thinking of Something Else”
Stephen Burt, “Poems about Superheroes”

[Cover image: Ann Arbor’s Shaman Drum Bookshop “Going Out of Business Sale” signs.]