Bøger af Elisa Gabbert

"Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory"--

"These poems collect strange facts, interrogate language, and ask unanswerable questions that offer the pleasure of discovery on nearly every page. How does one suffer 'gladly,' exactly? How bored are dogs? Which is more frightening, nothing or empty space? Was Wittgenstein sexy? With her ... observations building to ... quotable one-liners, the poems in this collection have an aphoristic, ear-wormy quality to them that's both ultra-contemporary and offers a reading experience that is at once essayistic, aphoristic, and philosophical"

Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection--unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.""Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise."--Make Magazine"... smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal,' like the panopticon eye of a camera."--The Rumpus"... the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node."--Gently Read Literature

A literary guide to digital anxiety, The Unreality of Memory collects thought-provoking and playful essays on the Internet age's media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world's ills.