The Word Exchange: A Novel

by Alena Graedon, Richard Powers Narrated by Tavia Gilbert, Richard Powers

Overview

A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word.

In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted "death of print" has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are a thing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called memes that not only keep us in constant communication but have become so intuitive as to hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.

Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language, where he is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate-or even actually spoke to one another. One evening, Doug disappears, leaving a single written clue: ALICE-a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm's way. Thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Joined by Bart, her bookish colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into dark basement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the anonymous Diachronic Society, the boardrooms of the evil online retailing site Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary-spiritual home of the written word. As Ana pieces together what is going on, and Bart gets sicker and sicker with the strange "word flu" that has spread worldwide and causes people to speak in gibberish, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the price of technology and the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Alena Graedon's spectacular debut is a story for our age of  'accelerated obsolescence.' A genuinely scary and funny mystery about linguistic slippage and disturbance, it's also a moving meditation on our sometimes comic, sometimes desperate struggles to speak, and to listen, and to mean something to one another.
To borrow Graedon's own invention, The Word Exchange is 'Synchronic' — a gorgeous genre mashup that offers readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance and philosophy. It's an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language."
 
-Karen Russell,  author of Swamplandia!, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
 
"Wow! This highly addictive future noir is also terrifyingly prescient. Set in a parallel New York filled with language viruses, pneumatic tubes, and heartbreak, Alena Graedon's book is luminous and haunting at every turn. I will never look at words in quite the same way—and neither will you."
       
-Reif Larsen,  author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169576238
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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