We are delighted to discuss Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books in the company of the author. We are also joined by Tina Lupton, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and Jessica Jordan, PhD Candidate in English Literature at Stanford University. Published in August 2019, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books challenges the alarmists of our mass-mediated age, concerned that the sun has set on the age of the printed book. Price argues that no such golden age of reading ever existed, that the present has no monopoly on distractibility, and that the experience of focused reading has always been highly contextual: shaped by readers’ ideas of what it means to read, and so profoundly informed by their relationship to the book object or text technology itself. As we begin a year of virtual teaching, conferencing, and reading, we are thrilled to discuss such a timely work.

To register, please follow this link. For PDFs of chapters from the book, please contact caseyp@stanford.edu.