Matthew Fisher is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book about library fires.
Matthew Fisher
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Writing on Public Books
The Cost of Copying
Two recent books about copying remind us how the digital age has made Bambis of us all: we struggle, as Disney’s fawn did, to find our balance on the ice, confused by the absence of the friction that makes the world navigable. It was only 15 years ago that Napster essentially removed the friction from […]
Less Vital Phenomena
A recent New York Times profile of Anthony Marra, the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, notes that “until the Boston Marathon bombings most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya.”1 Though Marra, whose novel is set against the backdrop of the Chechen Wars, is clearly an exception to this generalization, variations on the same […]
