Monday, July 27, 7:30 PM
Book(less) Dystopias and Linguistic Armageddons
Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange
Jonah Kruvant, author of The Last Book Ever Written
Jeffrey Rotter, author of The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering
Moderated by Justin Alvarez

As writers create stories of other worlds – future, fantastical, or alternate – many engage with the question of story itself. How might our relationship to language, words, and books themselves be different in a different context, and what might that tell us about our own world? Tonight at Greenlight, a panel of writers discusses the place of language and literature in their fictional universes. In Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange, the creators of the last print dictionary in an entirely digital age find themselves running afoul of the powers that be. Jonah Kruvant’s The Last Book Ever Written tells the story of a future officer of the law who goes undercover with an illegal community of writers, and finds that the faux-manuscript he has created takes on more significance than he intended. The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering, Jeffrey Rotter’s novel of a near-future America, is narrated in the mutated English of a post-literate age. The discussion is moderated by Justin Alvarez, former digital editor of the Paris Review and media editor of Guernica, now a publisher at Lucky Peach.