Debbie Foster

Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia, bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.

Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art.

I recognized that it was dangerous to conflate the workings of the brain with the technology I happened to be most familiar with, but it was hard not to think that way. Because what is a brain besides a collection of images and information, a repository of memories and desires and remembered song lyrics, and also a hundred open tabs draining energy

My journalist brain turned on. The light in the waiting room started to take on texture. Background sounds moved into the foreground, demanded engrossment. I felt close to something, the way some days when the air was cold and the sun was bright, I felt more alive. My mom used to describe these kinds of days as baking-soda days—when everything was

I need randomness to be happy.

It wasn't that she didn't like people. It was only that she liked books more. They didn't fuss or judge or mock or reject. They invited you in, fluffed up the pillows on the couch, offered you tes and toast, and shared their hearts with no expectation that you'd do anything more than absorb what they had to give.

Dropping the usefulness/uselessness framework restores us to the living purpose of fiction, which is for it to exist: for people to tell stories because they want to tell them. And it also puts artists in the same uncomfortable seat as everybody else; it's our job to save ourselves, and not to use art as a substitute for doing politics.

Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality: it can contribute to the disruption of that feedback loop. But it can't change reality on its own, by itself.

The problem, as Ghosh sees it, is that the parameters of reality demanded by the western novel—parameters that have been adopted worldwide, including in India, where he grew up—have always been deliberately, excessively narrow. At the birth of the western novel, the literary imagination was reconstructed around the idea of bourgeois stability and t