The Dark Library

Libraries are magical places. But what if they're even more magical than we know?

In Cyrille Martinez's library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He's tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops.

Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary?

The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.

Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 11/10/2020
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 7.50h x 4.70w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781552454077


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/21/2020
Booklist 10/15/2020 pg. 23
Foreword 10/26/2020

About the Author
Stancil, Joseph Patrick: -

Joseph Patrick Stancil has studied French and translation at UNC-Chapel Hill and New York University. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Martinez, Cyrille: -

Cyrille Martinez is a novelist and poet. He lives in Paris, where he is a librarian of French and comparative literature at the Sorbonne. He has published seven books, some of which have been adapted for theatre, and has done a number of readings in France and abroad. The Dark Library is his second book translated into English.