For me, more interesting than the “death of the book” debate has been how artists and authors have experimented with and combined print and digital media to speak to the political and cultural concerns of the present. At times this takes the form of fetishizing the book, as Jonathan Safran Foer does in Tree of Codes (2010). Others have embraced the potentiality of ereading platforms in experimenting with the form of the novel, as with the approach taken by Steve Tomasula in TOC: A New Media Novel (2009). In Between Pen and Pixel, a 2019 Eisner nominee in the category of Best Scholarly Work, Aaron Kashtan persuasively argues that comics are the medium that offers the most insights about the present and the future of the book, largely because of their inescapable physicality. Kashtan writes that, with novels, “we as readers are unlikely to pay attention to the physical attributes of the text we read — unless the author or typographer intentionally calls our attention to those attributes, as in the present sentence.” However, in comics, “the effect of materiality is much harder to ignore. If we want to know how the reading experience will be transformed by changes in its material context, we need to be looking at comics.”
Today, whether we’re doing history or current events, commerce or religion, we’re awash in iconoclasm but nearly bereft of icons. Everyone’s a court jester now, eager to expose the foibles of kings and queens. But the joke’s on us, because we no longer have authority figures to keep in check. We’re needling balloons that have already gone limp.
As a long-time travel writer, I'm frequently asked, "What is the most memorable trip you've ever taken?"
I usually answer with highlights of my latest encounter with a nice lie-flat business class seat, the time I got to fly on the Concorde, or my recent eye-opening trip to Mexico City.
But the real answer, one that I've kept mostly to myself until now, is this: Way back in 1992, at the beginning of my travel writing career, Elton John invited me to London for a whirlwind trip that included being backstage for his concerts at Wembley Stadium, staying over at his townhouse in central London and his rambling estate in Windsor, meeting royals, attending a star-studded garden party and racing around town in police-escorted Bentley limousines.
These nine near-faultless stories are laden with similarly pocketable treasures, not only heralding the arrival of a fully formed, entirely distinctive new voice but reinvigorating the short story itself. In the end, there’s no doubt who the lucky ones are: we, the readers.
Bernard, who uses the gender-neutral pronoun “they”, reminds us that the self is an overlaying of multiple identities, comprised not just of what is remembered and forgotten, but of how one is located in the wider questions of belonging, memory and solidarity.