On Browsing

(Paperback)

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Description

A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoonand gaining new appreciationamidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.

Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsings essays chronicle what weve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.

Reviews

Praise for On Browsing

"Why dont you reminisce with Jason Guriel about the vanishing art of browsing Along with the expected celebrations of old-fashioned bookshops and record stores, it also contains a tart incidental riff on the deficiencies (in Guriels opinion) of his native Canadas poetry scene: 'A duty read. A pity read. It demanded patriotism and kid gloves.'"
Gregory Cowles, New York Times

"Jason Guriels On Browsing offers a personal 'browser history' that reveals the author as much as it elegizes the habit of sifting through physical copies of music, books, and movies."

Literary Review of Canada

"Browsing is many things: a lifestyle, a relaxation, a revelation if your search finds a long-sought book or a rare recording, and perhaps more importantly a soul-refreshing excursion in a world of instant online search-and-buy options."
Winnipeg Free Press

"We need the voices of those like Guriel in our midst."
Literary Matters

"'Our choices are chisels,' says Jason Guriel. This moving book will fill you with a good kind of sadness and help you understand your own nostalgias.
Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine

"A mall parking lot, a defunct record store, the lingering crease on a book coveracross the all-flattening boundary of the digital age, Guriel recalls what it meant to access the universal one particular, physical piece at a time."
Tom Scocca, author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

Praise for Forgotten Work

A futuristic dystopian rock novel in rhymed couplets, this rollicking book is as unlikely, audacious and ingenious as the premise suggests.
New York Times

A wondrous novel.
Ron Charles, Washington Post

What do you get when you throw John Shade, Nick Drake, Don Juan, Sarah Records, and Philip K. Dick into a rhymed couplet machine Equal parts memory and forgetting, detritus and elegy, imagination and fancy, Forgotten Work could be the most singular novel-in-verse since Vikram Seths The Golden Gate. Thanks to Jason Guriels dexterity in metaphor-making, I found myself stopping and rereading every five lines or so, to affirm my surprise and delight.
Stephen Metcalf

This book has no business being as good as it is. Heroic couplets in the twenty-first century Its not a promising idea, but Forgotten Work is intelligent, fluent, funny, and wholly original. I cant believe it exists.
Christian Wiman

Author Bio

Jason Guriel is the author of several books, including the verse novel Forgotten Work (Biblioasis 2020). His writing has appeared in Air Mail, The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Walrus, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto.