Waste - Object Lessons (Paperback)

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 *