Name: The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
ISBN: 9781891241734

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The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time

Hugh Raffles

Paperback

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Critic Reviews

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Book Details

Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
Publish Date: Apr 18th, 2022
Pages: 384
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.98in - 1.10in - 1.10lb
EAN: 9781891241734
Categories: • Earth Sciences - Geology• Historical Geography• Archaeology

About the Author

Hugh Raffles is the author of Insectopedia, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and of In Amazonia: A Natural History which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Granta, Orion, and The New York Times, and he is the recipient of the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.

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What people are saying

Katie Holten | Language of Trees | Code Red ❤️

@katieholten

2 years

"There was just something completely pulsing. It’s possible it’s an outcome of the soft, white marble the city is perched upon. Nobody’s seen it for a long time, but it’s down there. (Read Hugh Raffles’s The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time.)" @rs_sparks 👋

Supporting writers with the Whiting Award, Creative Nonfiction Grant, and Literary Magazine Prizes

"This is an astonishing book... an invented composite itself – part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part psychogeography." For the @NewStatesman, @KathleenJamie reviews THE BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES by Whiting Award winner Hugh Raffles. https://t.co/uh907LocpD https://t.co/g7FT718KSQ

Writer + journalist. Author of FIRE AND ICE, about soot, climate, glaciers and an indomitable village in India. Next book: gas vs grassroots. Not on here much.

It was a pleasure to spend some time thinking about standing outside of time for the current issue of @nybooks – in a piece on two deeply engrossing (but very different) books: "The Book of Unconformities" by Hugh Raffles and "This is Chance!" by @jmooallem. https://t.co/J0cLSOg4Ek

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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Among the most mysterious books I've ever read--a dense, dark star . . . What intuition the book requires--and what magic tricks it performs. Stones speak, lost time leaves a literal record and, strangest of all, the consolation the writer seeks in the permanence of rocks, in their vast history, he finds instead in their vulnerability, caprice and still-unfolding story." (New York Times Critics' Pick)--Parul Sehgal "New York Times"

"Poetic . . . Each section is packed with vivid entertaining tales . . . The text shimmers with rangy curiosity, precise pictorial descriptions, well-narrated history, a sympathetic eye for the natural world, and a deft, light scholarly touch." (Starred review)
--Kirkus Reviews

"In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Mr. Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss . . . [The Book of Unconformities] is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated . . . A poignant and healing descent into deep time and its relevance to the human experience."
--Wall Street Journal

The Book of Unconformities is, in an entirely seductive and moving way, the most genre-bending book I've ever read. I've been unable to stop talking about this book all fall. And I've learned so much. Only Sebald's innovations struck me this wildly. Raffles takes a pair of devastating personal events along with him on an epic tour of the eccentricities and earth-shattering consequences of how and where we live with stone on this planet. I think of Robert Smithson's monumental projects in tandem with this book because this too is a monumental act of mourning, invoking the multitudinous worshipful and destructive things people have done to the only place in the end we truly stand.
--Eileen Myles

"As strange as it is beautiful, The Book of Unconformities is a work of great originality and imaginative force."--Elizabeth Kolbert

"A spellbinding time travelogue . . . Raffles's dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in metamorphic rock . . . Mesmerizing."--Harper's Magazine

"A work of poetic science, a smashing together of the human and the natural world, of cultures separated by time. Just as a geologic unconformity, this is erudite and artistic."--Library Journal

What people are saying

Katie Holten | Language of Trees | Code Red ❤️

Supporting writers with the Whiting Award, Creative Nonfiction Grant, and Literary Magazine Prizes

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