Dear readers,

There is a weird part of making something where you’ve finished your part of the process — the words are written, the page proofs checked — but it still hasn’t made its way into people’s hands just yet. It is somehow out of your control but not yet in the world. Not a very comfortable feeling for this writer who would happily tap away on most projects (forever?) without finishing them.

The novelist Jonathan Lethem referred to the period between a novel’s writing and its publication as “the gap” or “gulp,” writing that “the weirdness is in that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet.”

The “gulp” follows a long period of incubation, which unfolded across a series of spaces. I started researching this book in 2013. It has seen a lot of different desks: the beloved British Library reading rooms (Rare Books and Music, Floor 1 is my pick); a stuffy carrel in the Art History department in Sidney Smith Hall at the University of Toronto; the cavernous embrace of the belly of the Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterand (here I favoured the salle M, Ethnology, Sociology, Geography); the vaulted ceilings of the Institut national d’histoire d’art reading rooms; back in Toronto, a (beloved) concrete carrel on the 12th floor of Robarts Library; in the summer, the Pratt Library at Victoria College; my bedroom desk in my apartment on St. Clarens; then whoosh, to my corner-office at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen; back for a pit stop to that same desk in Toronto (now in the living room) and then on to its final destination in Villeray in Montreal.

But it’s done, it’s out. I’ve been getting photos of books on doorsteps and in the hands of friends and family as proof. 

There is a free excerpt from Chapter five of the book up on Literary Hub now, about Balzac, spectres, and the invention of photography. It was revisiting this section that prompted me to write last month’s letter to you on the invention of photography as an analogy for AI adoption.

In particular, it was this quote, from Nadar’s Quand j’étais photographe that made me think of the “present situation” (which I am doing my best not to monitor):

Exploding unexpectedly, totally unexpectedly, surpassing all possible expectations, diverting everything that we thought we knew and even what could be hypothesized, the new discovery indeed appeared as, and still is, the most extraordinary in the constellation of inventions that already have made our still unfinished century — in absence of other virtues — the greatest of the scientific centuries.

Sincerely,

Emily

P. S. 📣 Book events are happening in Toronto on May 28th, in Seattle on June 4th, and in Montreal on September 10th, with more to follow. More details here.