The Discarded

by Colin Hamilton

A dazzling array of meta-fictions, Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded describes 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?

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2024

About the author

Colin Hamilton has helped create a library, a center for dance, affordable housing projects for artists, and a park. He is the author The Discarded (2024), The Thirteenth Month (2019), and The Memory Palace (1999). He lives in St. Paul.

Reviews

[Dale Stromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loss and impermanence may be inherent in culture, for even as our capacity to carry forward remains finite, time never stops passing and cultural inventions never stop emerging. This collection of essays examines “discarded” books, those deemed insufficiently relevant for libraries to bother preserving, finding in them a self-refractive lens through which to examine the poignancy of those selfsame books’ erosion from the culture by the ceaseless current of time. The book ranges widely enough that the reader may struggle to identify thematic throughlines, but what binds it together instead is a mood, a kind of librarian’s wabi-sabi, which does not both savour and lament, but rather savours the lament of the slow loss of books from the world.

While it did of course occur to me in passing that each of these “discarded” books might have been fictitious, not actually existing obscure books, I confess I took the essays at face value and presumed the books to be real. (Now the internet seems to tell me that Hamilton invented them all.) That I was handily snookered speaks to the ingenuity and eye for verisimilar detail that Hamilton brings to each fabricated book and its fictive author.

[JoJo Ha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book. Hamilton’s use of language is poetic. His prose is both laugh-out-loud funny and profound. Often, I would find myself asking, “Is this true?” But then I decided it did mot matter. This is fiction. Colin Hamilton is a literary talent to watch.

[Glenn R. Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hamilton's prose is equally luxuriant, enchanting, and always entertaining. Lines demand to be reread not just for their poetic quality, but for the wisdom contained within. As a bibliophile, I would contend the premise is consistently delightful, with the story loosely revolving around a dedicated librarian who processes discarded volumes from his library's stacks. But the librarian himself is a secondary player within the book's much larger story: that of books and writers of the past who have, through time, become unfairly neglected or forgotten. Beyond being savored, Hamilton's book should be -- what is the opposite of discarded? -- acquired and treasured.

[Kristin Henning · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title refers to the assemblage of discarded books the librarian narrator discovers in the bowels of a newly built library. In all, twenty titles are examined, reimagined, and gracefully woven into highly original tales.

Each chapter – a distinct Discarded title – is introduced with an account of a library system described in literature. (Examples include the Cemetery of Lost Books featured in Carlos Ruiz Zafrón’s The Shadow of the Wind, and the very real Los Angeles Public Library, the subject of Susan Orleans’ riveting report on the fire that swept through it, in The Library Book.)

It's too simplistic to claim Hamilton’s survey of the twenty discarded books is pure or mere fiction. More than that, the twenty stories dance between a dizzying range of facts – actual book subjects and real writers – and the author’s rich imagination.

As any historical references fall away, the reader is left with whimsical titles and compelling original narratives. It seems the deeper in Hamilton ventures, the more playful the relationship with any source materials. In “The Museum in Winter,” the only book without an author credit, the narrator presumably turns the device on himself, riffing on his own imagined discarded manuscript.

The Discarded is sprinkled with plenty of references to ghosts, escape artists, metamorphoses, and all sorts of ephemeral threads and surreal connections. The narrator, in fact, recalls the time “when I was both filled with a desire to become someone new and unnerved by how easy it was to do so – as though there was no core to my being, and thus no shape I couldn’t configure myself into.”

“What an odd destiny to not write your own books but to retell, and yes, streamline, those of others,” the narrator said of Simon Stein, the supposed author of the graphic novel recreation of "The Great Balzoni Disappears" [sic].

In another amusing twist, the narrator calls out a case of ‘inverted plagiarism’ when a poet’s biographer chooses to use his own poem to illustrate the text. The narrator remarks, “What struck me is that Vasilakis has to write an entire book of prose in order to get a single one of his poems into print.”

These reflections on the dynamic role of authors will delight readers, writers, librarians, puzzle solvers, historians, and literary critics. While the interpretation of texts is always in flux, rarely are we invited to be in on the fun as we are here.

The Discarded pays tribute to libraries and our rather futile tendencies to gather and preserve all the world’s raw information, range of opinion, and forces of creativity. It’s also a wonderful vehicle for the inventive prose of the talented Hamilton.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nonfiction voice" sometimes tells us fictional things. The thing about fiction is that it is also true. I wrote about this book on Medium with a photo of a dragonfly. These short fictions are not (by the way) whatsoever plot-driven, and neither (generally) are the books described therein. I wouldn't exactly call them character-driven either, though the authors do feature and their characters are discussed. I feel as though they're more device-driven, if that's a thing. The Discarded cracks open other books to inspect their workings. Thus The Discarded itself works as a collection of devices, like a cuckoo clock telling you you've got limited time to look inside the shoebox in the breakroom and read the books that have already been rejected by the librarians, as, at any moment, these last copies may disappear. This fiction has all the makings of a library. I think that's what it's going for: a sense of fullness yet incompleteness. You could generate countless books, some of which would be fictional books about fictional books, but the library would never be complete and meanwhile the librarians would discard some of them. In the interest of fullness, you'd probably swipe them out of the discard box. You're that kind of reader, which is why you're here.

[Willy Big · Rating 5 out of 5]

That’s why he’s the goat, the goat