Synopses & Reviews
An exuberant, expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between a reader and a book.
A way to leave a trace of us, who we were or wanted to be, what we read and could imagine, what we did and what we left for you.
Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.
Letter to a Future Lover collects several dozen brief pieces written in response to library ephemera — with “library” defined broadly, ranging from university institutions to friends shelves, from a seed library to a KGB prison library — and addressed to readers past, present, and future. Through these witty, idiosyncratic essays, Ander Monson reflects on the human need to catalog, preserve, and annotate; the private and public pleasures of reading; the nature of libraries; and how the self can be formed through reading and writing.
Review
“Amidst much tedious hand-wringing re: the future of the book, Ander Monson not only shows us the way forward but chronicles codex's codes, singing an ode to book qua book, to marginalia and to the margins. A physically beautiful and intellectually thrilling work.” David Shields
Review
"Ander Monson loves the world with such powerful desperation — even/especially the awful parts — and he loves, maybe even more, all our failed attempts at representation. Being inside his mind for a few hours, being in such close quarters with all that love, is perhaps the greatest pleasure of reading Letter to a Future Lover, but it is not, by a long shot, the only one." Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
Review
"As an eclectic writer, editor and academic, Monson defies conventional continuity to make leaps of connection, not only between paragraphs, but even within a sentence. He continues to challenge the very meaning of meaning, daring readers to come to terms with 'the book, the book about the book,' and the very concept of the library, be it public, prison, personal, seed, digital or abandoned and repurposed....Each reader will have a different experience with the book, which the author suggests is as much the reader's book as the writer's." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Like you, I've read so many 'books about the book' by now: the thick tome of biblioscholarship, the collections of (think Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick) weird titles, the books that saved somebody's childhood, plus the bucket list books, and the histories of papermaking and font design....And now, as if these books have met to form a private club we can join, here's Ander Monson's tribute to written marginalia, published lists of errata, book defacings, bindings, maps, tickertape and sacred texts, a braille Playboy, those dear old library check-out slips, all of it in that wonderful allusive, poetic, factoidal Monsonian vision and voice that allow him, finally, to take on the entire cosmos we live in, stars and death and love and memory. If you can find a card catalogue still in existence, check under G for 'genius.'" Albert Goldbarth
About the Author
Ander Monson is the author of Vanishing Point, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments. He edits DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona.