Description
The Discarded, Colin Hamilton
$28.00
ISBN: 9798987019931
Fine Softcover with Dust-jacket; 271 pages; 5”x7.5”
Publication Date: March 12, 2024
Summary
A dazzling array of metafictions, Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded focuses on the lonely work of a solitary librarian assigned to the discard room. This hidden basement space is piled high with books purged from the stacks above. Many have been damaged, defaced, or made irrelevant by time. Others simply sat untouched for years before being thrown out to make room for glossy new arrivals.
From the heap of discards, the librarian salvages his own idiosyncratic collection: a detective novel in which a damsel-in-distress insists she’s been murdered; A Guide to Universal Grasping, the “Ulysses of technical manuals;” a biography of David Markson written in the fragmented style of his experimental novels; an anthology of anthro-reptilian eroticism; a children’s book memorializing winter for those raised in an overheated world; a book of essays, The Hell of Insects, by entomologists who’ve been spoken to by their subjects; and a history of book burning.
With Borgesian panache, The Discarded interweaves stories about imaginary books with reflections on libraries, both real and dreamt. Hamilton’s nuanced collection asks a seemingly simple question: In an age of decreasing literacy, disposable content, and banned books, what do we preserve and what do we discard?
Author
Colin Hamilton has helped create a library, a center for dance, affordable housing projects for artists, and a park. He is the author of a poetry chapbook and a novel, The Thirteenth Month. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in St. Paul.
Reviews
“… there’s something mesmerizing about the collective encyclopedia of knowledge [these discarded books] comprise … a moving celebration of even those works that arguably warrant being consigned to oblivion.”
Previous Praise for Colin Hamilton
The Thirteenth Month is a sui generis novel. With echoes of memoir, travelogue, bibliography, and kunstlerroman, it contains the research and lore of a great essay, the depth of a metaphysical poem, but the soul of a novel … Intelligent without pretension, worldly without condescension, Hamilton renders both scenes and mindscapes with equal mastery of the terrain.
Phong Nguyen, author of Pages from the Textbook of Alternative History and The Adventures of Joe Harper
Colin Hamilton has combined the visible and the invisible into a truly unusual first book … The writing is exquisite, the mysteries engaging, and the result original.
Marvin Bell, author of The Book of the Dead Man and Nightworks: Poems 1962 — 2000.
The Thirteenth Month is a multiverse of mirrors and infinite texts spanning the inevitable labyrinth that exists between a young man’s books and his reality. It belongs in the company of Borges, Pessoa, and Schulz, the very writers Hamilton admires, all the while cleverly disguised as an Iowan’s bildungsroman.
Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
This is a sophisticated hybrid of Borgesian imagination and heart-broken, yet dry-eyed, memoir … ‘touched by the divine finger of poetry’ himself, [Hamilton] writes with admirable grace, clarity, and appetite, whether about invisible cities or his mother’s fighting dementia.
DeWitt Henry, Ploughshares
Masterfully conceived and effortlessly rendered, Colin Hamilton has given us a delightfully enthralling and immersive account of the power of narrative to elucidate and transform the world. I relished every page.
Matthew Vollmer, author of Future Missionaries of America and Permanent Exhibit
The poetry, page after page, is of the kind that keeps the reader on the critical edge, both ecstatic and lucid, both active and illumined … Nothing more exotic here than the beauty of utterance set free.
Stavros Deligiorgis
