Secondhand Memories

Originally serialized online in 2008 with a readership of over 60,000, Secondhand Memories pioneered the Japanese cell phone novel phenomenon in the English-speaking world, marking a moment in history and re-envisioning technology, youth culture, community and literature. The unique fusion of simple haiku-like poetic technique and prose narrative together forms a coming-of-age journey about Seiji and Aoi: high school sweethearts, who are separated by a tragic chasm of frozen time. As the rest of the world moves on, Seiji discovers that life is more complicated than he thought - and that the heart and mind is quite vulnerable to change. The novel contemplates the meaning of growing up, love, loss and sacrifice.

Sheds new light on pre-modern Chinese gender relationships in the context of marriage, male Confucian literati self-presentation, and social networks. In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

Phonographic Memories is the first book to perform a sustained analysis of the narrative and thematic influence of Caribbean popular music on the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide attention to the deep connections between music and memory in the work of Lawrence Scott, Oscar Hijuelos, Colin Channer, Daniel Maximin, and Ramabai Espinet, Njelle Hamilton tunes in to each novel’s soundtrack while considering the broader listening cultures that sustain collective memory and situate Caribbean subjects in specific localities. These “musical fictions” depict Caribbean people turning to calypso, bolero, reggae, gwoka, and dub to record, retrieve, and replay personal and cultural memories. Offering a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization, Phonographic Memories affirms the continued importance of Caribbean music in providing contemporary novelists ethical narrative models for sounding marginalized memories and voices. Njelle W. Hamilton's Spotify playlist to accompany Phonographic Memories: https://spoti.fi/2tCQRm8

This volume engages with memory of the Holocaust as expressed in literature, film, and other media. It focuses on the cultural memory of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors, while also taking into view those who were children during the Nazi period. Language loss, language acquisition, and the multiple needs of translation are recurrent themes for all of the authors discussed. By bringing together authors and scholars (often both) from different generations, countries, and languages, and focusing on transgenerational and translational issues, this book presents multiple perspectives on the subject of Holocaust memory, its impact, and its ongoing worldwide communication.

Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the bestselling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.

Marcus Byruck grew up in a one-room flat in the Jewish ghetto of London's East End. His father sold rags from a cart and his mother died in an asylum. Bright and ambitious, he escaped poverty to work his way to Oxford University and on to a career in the burgeoning computer industry of 1960's Silicon Valley. Then he experienced his first grand-mal seizure, breaking his back and launching a decades-long battle with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. In this memoir, Marcus Byruck, aged 80, recounts the discovery of the rare form of amnesia associated with his epilepsy, which deletes memories of specific experiences, while leaving intact his ability to recall other forms of information. Since his condition ironically renders him unable to remember much of his life, he draws on the recollections of his wife and son, on the journals and records he meticulously maintained throughout his life, and on his ongoing relationships with the neuroscientists who have studied him. At each stage of his journey, he candidly describes his own psychological conditions, his struggles with debilitating depression and anxiety, and in the process offers an indictment of mainstream psychiatry's overreliance on the drugs which nearly killed him. The result is an intimate and ultimately uplifting portrait of a deeply gifted American immigrant, plagued by a disease that erases his reality with each new day.

This book explores the trend of retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture. Using empirical evidence obtained from a case study of fans’ engagement with older music, the book argues that retro culture is the result of an inseparable mix of cultural and technological changes, namely, the rise of a new generation and cultural mood along with the encouragement of new technologies. Retro culture has become a hot topic in recent years but this is the first time the subject has been explored from an academic perspective and from the fans’ perspective. As such, this book promises to provide concrete answers about why retro culture dominates in contemporary society. For the first time ever, this book provides an empirically grounded theory of popular music, retro culture and its intergenerational audience in the twenty-first century. It will appeal to advanced students of popular music studies, cultural studies, media studies, sociology and music.

Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story. In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it? The Box follows an impenetrable rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give secondhand accounts of decisive moments in the box's life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection, from a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumours and rely on faulty memories, grasping at something that continually escapes them. Haunting their recollections in one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box's good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation. In this mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, Mandy-Suzanne Wong challenges our understanding of subject and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn't animate? What do we value and what do we discard?