ISSUE 31
Imagining the Future

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LEE GUTKIND • From the Editor

Feature Section • Imagining the Future

MUHAREM BAZDULJ • Imagine
DINTY W. MOORE • YouTube Can Be a Published Author
DAVID HENRY STERRY • The Death of the Book
GEORGE GIBSON • The Future in the Past
ROBERT J. HUGHES • The Fetishistic Book
C. MICHAEL CURTIS • The Book Business: Looking Ahead
ROBIN HEMLEY • Introducing . . . Trump Jerky Books!
GLORIANA ST. CLAIR • Books Without Borders
REBECCA T. MILLER • The Library as Storyplace
PHILLIP LOPATE • Best of Times, Worst of Times read an excerpt
IMMANUEL MIFSUD • The Phone
DONNA SEAMAN • Netting the Future read an excerpt
AMY STOLLS • What We've Got Here Is a Failure to . . . Um . . .
ASTRO TELLER • Writing Isn't the Future of Writing
HEIDI JULAVITS • The Writers in the Silos read an excerpt
IRA BERKOW • What Future of Newspapers?
MARITA GOLDEN • Literature Can Save the World . . . If We Let It!

The Readings

DENISE SHEKERJIAN • Luke and Leonardo
DENNIS COVINGTON • Diagnosis / Cure
JUDITH BARRINGTON • What the Living Do
DAVID APPLEFIELD • Conakry
BARBARA LOUNSBERRY • Shoot the Messenger: Gay Talese at 75

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

By 2025, “devouring a book” may be more than a figure of speech. Books will be consumable products—in digestible pill forms, as injections and even as beef jerky, according to predictions in Imagining the Future. This issue brings together voices from across the publishing spectrum—from novelists and journalists to librarians and editors—all of them speculating about the ways literature and the business of writing will change in the coming decades.

From outlandish to the pragmatic, the writers find common ground as they marvel at the way technology has ushered in a new era of communication. In “Best of Times, Worst of Times,” essayist and memoirist Phillip Lopate conjures up versions of books that will meet the needs of humanity in 2025: the floating book (“in response to the rising water-levels at our coasts”), the impulse book, the book-shot (“devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary dose with their daily injections”).

Booklist editor Donna Seaman, in “Netting the Future,” contemplates our evolving relationship with the Internet and observes: “As we write, read, surf, scroll, talk, watch, sample and shop, the manufacture of our marvelously smart and companionable machines—seemingly clean objects—involves the use of toxic chemicals that are now found all around the world embedded in soil, ice, water, air and the bodies of living humans and animals. ... The virtual world has an all too tangible impact on the living earth.”

Amy Stolls, literature program officer for the National Endowment for the Arts, calculates that according to recent trends, 87% of the population will claim “writer” as an occupation by 2025. Furthermore, she writes, “the universal library of all human verbiage [will show] 1.4 million genres, with 230,000 subcategories labeled ‘For Dummies.’”

Imagining the Future includes seventeen intriguing essays from across the literary landscape and six elegant and thought-provoking illustrations created by Little Kelpie, a creative studio in Pittsburgh.