Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word
    Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word
    Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word
    Audiobook6 hours

    Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

    Written by Matthew Battles

    Narrated by Matthew Battles

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration.

    Celebrating the impulse to record, invent, and make one's mark, Matthew Battles reenchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all of its forms.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 18, 2015
    ISBN9781494582531
    Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

    Related to Palimpsest

    Related audiobooks

    Language Arts & Discipline For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Essay On Faith

      May 1, 2022

      exordium While sound and seaworthy, I confess a life of false confessions, false hearts, ample contempt for bench warrants charging me with failures to appear. Let what interest death’s elbow grease won’t erase compound, judgments sealed in my ova, m

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Self Is Other People

      Apr 3, 2018

      The Self Is Other People
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Conspirasphere

      Feb 23, 2023

      Kaiser Heinrich XIII of the Fourth Reich was always going to be a long shot. Even if you buy the contentions of the Reichsbürger movement – that the Second World War never officially ended, because no peace treaty was signed between Germany and the A

      3 min read

    • Article

      The State Of It

      Sep 12, 2021

      The State Of It
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jennifer S. Cheng

      Dec 21, 2021

      This list, culled to 10 entries, is a history of care and tenderness these past several months. It traces a web of connections against the distances of the moment. The post A Year in Reading: Jennifer S. Cheng appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Book Of Maps

      Dec 1, 2022

      Four years ago, I bought myself a paperback atlas—a floppy, glossy, 200-page edition quite unlike the hardback tome that had gathered dust on my shelf for decades. And this flimsy new atlas soon altered my grasp of reality in a way so elemental that

      4 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Eroded Tropes and Fears and Consequences: The Millions Interviews Alyson Hagy

      Sep 28, 2018

      It’s been 18 years since Alyson Hagy and I both won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nested within the list of grantees was a scattering of addresses. I wrote to Alyson. She answered. We’ve seen each other just twice in all these yea

      8 min read

    • Article

      Oh, Corona

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books The Lights by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover) According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture c

      7 min read

    • Article

      Sensualiterature

      Mar 29, 2021

      BRIAN DOYLE (1957–2017) was the longtime editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays and fiction, most notably the novels Mink River and Martin Marten. ONE OF THE THINGS that we do not talk about w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Paper Love

      Jun 17, 2022

      Paper Love
      9 min read

    • Article

      Writing Bound to Bodies: Cristina Rivera Garza in Conversation with Samantha Hunt

      Oct 30, 2017

      I see myself as someone creating spaces in language in which rubble may speak for itself, bringing its pastness with it. In a country in which bodies are made to forcefully disappear, a skeleton is a last remnant of the material life—and a material t

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Awe and Attention of Durga Chew-Bose

      Nov 21, 2017

      As I think is the case for most writers born after 1980, the first outlets to publish my work were online. To be more specific, they were blogs—online spaces that valued ideas and abstraction over narrative and detail. My writing followed an outline

      4 min read

    • Article

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Anne Yoder

      Dec 21, 2019

      I was nonplussed by the clarity of his name and my seeming lack of connection to it, and so I followed this thread to see where it led, if it did. The post A Year in Reading: Anne Yoder appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ode To The Library Museum

      Jul 24, 2018

      Ode To The Library Museum
      6 min read

    • Article

      Letter To Arthur Sze From Penngrove

      Jul 1, 2023

      To Arthur Sze, dear friend, Keeper of the Acequia, now I remember … finding your poems in Tyuonyi, a small literary magazine published by the remarkable poet and editor Phillip Foss, during a time, the early 1980s, when both of you were teaching at t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • Article

      Star Letter

      Dec 1, 2022

      Star Letter
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Alejandro Varela

      Dec 19, 2023

      I read to be a better writer and hopefully a better human. The post A Year in Reading: Alejandro Varela appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Palimpsest

    2.5/5

    13 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This... is not a history of the written word. It's a set of miscellaneous musings on writing and on scattered moments in the history of writing, more poetic than informative and more dreamily philosophical than coherent or substantial. Which, I have to say, is really not my kind of thing. There were moments, especially early on, when one of the author's sentences would strike me as prettily insightful, and times, mostly in later chapters, when I did learn something interesting about the history of printing that I didn't know. But despite that, I mostly found it kind of frustrating, overall, and ended up more or less forcing myself to finish it.Rating: I'm calling this 2.5/5, but it's one of those books that's really hard to rate, because I am sure there are readers out there for whom this book will be perfect. It's just that I'm decidedly not one of them.

      1 person found this helpful