The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories (Non/Fiction Collection Prize)
Description
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.”
Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
Praise for The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories (Non/Fiction Collection Prize)
“This astonishingly beautiful book of interlocking stories has at its center things and people that are about to disappear. Sometimes what has been lost, however, can be recovered. It is as if all these stories compose one large story, an emotional journey of the lost and found. It should be read from beginning to end—people and things, such as a barber pole, migrate from one story to another. A wonderful book.” —Charles Baxter
“The Registry of Forgotten Objects is impressive for the unique and inventive vision of the author. These stories consider the permanence that abides beneath the surface of all that leaves this world and the desire to believe that ‘everything is part of a pattern, everything rises.’ No truer words could be said about this collection. Miles Harvey is a masterful storyteller.” —Lee Martin