Phone Booth

(Paperback)

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Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Reviews

An entertaining and enlightening exploration of the cultural history of the phone booth and a lament for the loss of these spaces. * WPR: BETA *
In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observationhanging wires and scratched glassto the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout. * Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *
Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way. * Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USA, and author of The Telephone Book *
[Phone Booth] inclines us towards nostalgia, toward urgent questions of what remains when objects disappear, of re-use, and shelter. If phone booths today have receded into the interstices of our built worlds then that freeing of the object from its use enables Arianna Kelly to tell a different story, a story about what these telephonic leftovers might become, what they now are and what they anchor. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Author Bio

Ariana Kelly is a freelance writer and educator. She teaches English literature and comparative religion at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California, USA, and has written for, among other publications, The L.A. Review of Books and Salon.