[quote]
I want to destroy this book. I want to pick it up and throw it out a window, where birds can pick at it, and cars can run it over, and rainfall can wash away the words on the page. I want to damage this book until it cannot be read. Burning is too simple. I don’t want to glorify the text with something as glorious as a bonfire. I don’t want the book to go down in a hail of bullets, front-page news. No, I want the book to wither before death, as if falling into mud patches, hitchhiking out to the edges of things, before stumbling off to a slow, empty oblivion. I want the book to suffer disillusionment before a lonely death. I want the book to be forgotten, entirely, like a sandgrain among so many beachheads, buried deep. Ergo, I label the book into a category. Memoir, for instance. I will call this text a “Memoir”.
What I have done to this hypothetical book is to damage it far worse than burning a few copies. Now, only people who read memoirs will read this book. People who do not generally read memoirs will be disinclined to approach the book. They will have to get over their own prejudices based on their experience of memoirs past, and judge the book according to expectations. Despite the numerous fictional elements omnipresent in the memoir category, like the dialog that is recreated from memory or the colors and textures of the world as described and the narrative arc bent out of unnarrative life, this book will no longer be measured for the fiction of things, but for the truth of them.
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It went up a couple days ago, from the look of things.
Try to buy something while you're over there. The Apex Book of World SF, for instance, which is an awesome and surprising book of awesome.
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