A dazzling array of meta-fictions, Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded describes the lonely work of a solitary librarian assigned to the discard room. This hidden basement space is piled high with books purged from the stacks above. Many have been damaged, defaced, or made irrelevant by time. Others simply sat untouched for years before being thrown out to make room for glossy new arrivals.
From the heap of discards, the librarian salvages his own idiosyncratic collection: a detective novel in which a damsel-in-distress insists she’s been murdered; A Guide to Universal Grasping, the “Ulysses of technical manuals;” a biography of David Markson written in the fragmented style of his experimental novels; an anthology of anthro-reptilian eroticism; a children’s book memorializing winter for those raised in an overheated world; a book of essays, The Hell of Insects, by entomologists who’ve been spoken to by their subjects; and a history of book burning.
With Borgesian panache, The Discarded interweaves stories about imaginary books with reflections on libraries, both real and dreamt. Hamilton’s nuanced collection asks a seemingly simple question: In an age of decreasing literacy, disposable content, and banned books, what do we preserve and what do we discard?
Pub. Date: 3/11/2023
ISBN: 9798987019931| Paperback | Pages: 270
Publisher: Unbound Editions
Raised in a town that prizes poets above doctors and astronauts, the narrator of The Thirteenth Month is a constant reader, and it is through books – real and imagined — that he experiences the world, from the libraries of Dar es Salaam to the dead-end streets of Cleveland. While he believes he is being prepared to write himself, he is ultimately called to a different, less romantic task – helping his increasingly demented mother die.
Bruno Schulz described a thirteenth month as an unnatural time when “one may be touched by the divine finger of poetry.” Hamilton shows that touch to be both divine and troubling. Elegantly structured, The Thirteenth Month follows the elusive thread between the books we read, the actions we take and the people we become.
Pub. Date: 11/15/2019
ISBN: 978-1-62557-014-7| Paperback | Pages: 215
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Distributor: Small Press Distributor
“Colin Hamilton has combined the visible and the invisible into a truly unusual first book. In three poetic sequences, The Memory Palace weaves layers of psychological narrative into separate versions of an inner biography. The writing is exquisite, the mysteries engaging, and the result original.”―Marvin Bell
“The poetry, page after page, is of the kind that keeps the reader on the critical edge, both ecstatic and lucid, both active and illumined… . What began in the first part of the book with the evocations of a struggle to unclench a rock-locked fist’ is projected, in the end, on the geography of the continent itself, desolate yet lyrical. Nothing more exotic here than the beauty of utterance set free.”―Stavros Deligiorgis
ISBN: 978-0873385916 | Paperback | 31 pages
Publisher: The Kent State University Press