Brooding

This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martones friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martones style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues, while the essays on the death of Martones mother and father were written on Facebook while the events happened. One essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written solely in tweets. Broodingthe books title and the title of an essaydraws a parallel between the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after seventeen years, of a brood of cicadas. Throughout these essays Martones words inhabit spaces where the reconnection to people in the past and the metaphors of electronic memory converge.