Waste

by Brian Thill, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it's also waste-or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628924367
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/24/2015
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Brian Thill is Professor of English at Golden West College, USA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Jacobin, Mediations, 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

The beach that speaks
Trash familiars/Tabflab
Pigs in space
Million-year panic
Ruinism
Splinter, shard, and stone
Where the hoard is
Lake Carbamazepine
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Fascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill's Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can't read it and come out of the experience unchanged.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Reach trilogy

“If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard-from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic-and illuminates invisible margins we'd often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound.” —Leslie Jamison, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy Exams

“Waste is the finest filth around-or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public-our discards become our fate and home both-and finds treasure.” —Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night

“Waste pluralizes, names a condition into which objects fall, takes us beachcombing, dumpster diving. 'Waste is every object, plus time'… The true aim of Brian Thill's book, however, is… that non-place to which waste is sent. We cannot afford… to believe in such a zone any longer. Of course, we never really could or did - out of sight was simply out of mind. Waste always kept coming back.” —Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

Waste is the finest filth around-or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public-our discards become our fate and home both-and finds treasure.

author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night Alexander Chee

If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard-from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic-and illuminates invisible margins we'd often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound.

New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy E Leslie Jamison

Fascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill's Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can't read it and come out of the experience unchanged.

New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Jeff VanderMeer