Book As Performance

Each single-author book is immensely particular, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it. Scholarship is a collagist, building the next iteration of what we know book by book. Stories end, and that, I think, is a very good thing. A single authorial voice is a kind of performance, with an audience of one at a time, and no performance should outstay its welcome. Because a book must end, it must have a shape, the arc of thought that demonstrates not only the writer's command of her or his subject but also that writer's respect for the reader. A book is its own set of bookends.

~ William Germano ~