On Browsing

Praise for On Browsing Why don't you reminisce with Jason Guriel about the vanishing art of browsing? Along with the expected celebrations of old-fashioned bookshops and record stores, it also contains a tart incidental riff on the deficiencies (in Guriel's opinion) of his native Canada's poetry scene: 'A duty read. A pity read. It demanded patriotism and kid gloves.' -Gregory Cowles, New York Times Jason Guriel's On Browsing offers a personal 'browser history' that reveals the author as much as it elegizes the habit of sifting through physical copies of music, books, and movies. -Literary Review of Canada Browsing is many things: a lifestyle, a relaxation, a revelation if your search finds a long-sought book or a rare recording, and perhaps more importantly a soul-refreshing excursion in a world of instant online search-and-buy options. -Winnipeg Free Press We need the voices of those like Guriel in our midst. -Literary Matters 'Our choices are chisels,' says Jason Guriel. This moving book will fill you with a good kind of sadness and help you understand your own nostalgias. -Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine A mall parking lot, a defunct record store, the lingering crease on a book cover-across the all-flattening boundary of the digital age, Guriel recalls what it meant to access the universal one particular, physical piece at a time. -Tom Scocca, author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future Praise for Forgotten Work A futuristic dystopian rock novel in rhymed couplets, this rollicking book is as unlikely, audacious and ingenious as the premise suggests. -New York Times A wondrous novel. -Ron Charles, Washington Post What do you get when you throw John Shade, Nick Drake, Don Juan, Sarah Records, and Philip K. Dick into a rhymed couplet machine? Equal parts memory and forgetting, detritus and elegy, imagination and fancy, Forgotten Work could be the most singular novel-in-verse since Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. Thanks to Jason Guriel's dexterity in metaphor-making, I found myself stopping and rereading every five lines or so, to affirm my surprise and delight. -Stephen Metcalf This book has no business being as good as it is. Heroic couplets in the twenty-first century? It's not a promising idea, but Forgotten Work is intelligent, fluent, funny, and wholly original. I can't believe it exists. -Christian Wiman