Redeeming the Medium

Anne Carson's Nox is more than a book, it's an art object.  It comes in a box and its pages fold out, accordion-style, slowly revealing itself as it stretches across your desk or lap.  Reviewing it for New York magazine, Sam Anderson says:

Few things in this world have the power to make me clean my desk. One of them, it turns out, is Anne Carson’s new book-in-a-box, Nox. Before I even opened it, I felt an irresistible urge to spend twenty minutes purging my worktable of notes, napkins, magazines, forks, check stubs, unpaid bills, and fingernail clippings. The urge struck me, I think, for a couple of reasons. For one, Nox is unwieldy. It is, very deliberately, a literary object—the opposite of an e-reader designed to vanish in your palm as you read on a train.

Nox is an elegy written for Carson's brother, Michael, who died unexpectedly in 2000.  It's a scrapbook, a portrait of her brother that comes into focus like a Polaroid photo as the pages pile up.  And it's a beautiful reminder of the things that only the print medium can still do.

At the AWP conference this year, Brian Kevin, a former editor for CutBank, said that perhaps the future of literary magazines and small presses is tied to redeeming the print medium by combining long-form writing with striking design.  That redemption would come in the form of a book like Nox that could never be reproduced in digital form. Sure, some smart designer could mock up a simulation of the accordion folding and intersperse the pages with multimedia, but the effect of rolling across a space and filling in a story wouldn't be the same.

(photo via New York magazine)

Matt Wood

Matt Wood is a book review editor for TriQuarterly, and a writer and social media specialist for the University of Chicago Medicine. He graduated from the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at Northwestern University in 2007, where his final thesis, "Through an Unlocked Door," won the Distinguished Thesis Award.

Twitter: @woodtang

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