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144 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication January 1, 2026
I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”
I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless …. But it wasn’t just people: the light arriving from the stars was younger, too, the birds dreaming in the tree cavities were the birds of the past, growth rings had vanished from the trees in which they slept—and this time travel depended on my being prevented from checking on Eva or Googling “songbird life expectancy” or “Caroline Sharpe” as I walked uphill.
I wanted to hurt him. Once—only once—did I tell him about my concern with Emmie’s eating, and before the word ‘Hungerkünstler’ was fully out of his mouth, before he could quote his beloved Kafka at me, or launch into some discourse about the history of pre-Christian asceticism, I snapped at him in German: This is not … theater, Dad, this isn’t art or literature, Emmie isn’t a character in a fiction, she’s my .. daughter.