Description
Book SynopsisA moving and original literary approach to self-understanding through social media
The hunger for a feeling of connection that informs most everything I''ve written flows from a common break in a common heart, one I share with everyone I've ever really known.Note Book
Every single morning since early 2007, Princeton English professor Jeff Nunokawa has posted a brief essay in the Notes section of his Facebook page. Often just a few sentences but never more than a few paragraphs, these compelling literary and personal meditations have raised the Facebook post to an art form, gained thousands of loyal readers, and been featured in the New Yorker. In Note Book, Nunokawa has selected some 250 of the most powerful and memorable of these essays, many accompanied by the snapshots originally posted alongside them. The result is a new kind of literary work for the age of digital and social media, one that reimagines the essay's efforts, at least since Montaigne, to understand our common condition by trying to understand ourselves.
Ranging widely, the essays often begin with a quotation from one of Nunokawa's favorite writersGeorge Eliot, Henry James, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, or James Merrill, to name a few. At other times, Nunokawa is just as likely to be discussing Joni Mitchell or Spanish soccer striker Fernando Torres.
Confessional and moving, enlightening and entertaining, Note Book is ultimately a profound reflection on loss and lonelinessand on the compensations that might be found through writing, literature, and connecting to others through social media.
Trade Review"Part of what Nunokawa is after is a sense of how art and literature not just move but also transform us, by becoming a part of how we engage the world. In that sense, the essays here can be taken as close reads -- if close reading can be stripped clean of analysis, taken into an emotional realm. But even more, he is recording the slow, amorphous passage of experience, in which what we think and what we do, what we ponder and remember, make up in large measure who we are."-David Ulin, Los Angeles Times "Reading the entries in Note Book is a warm, wistful experience, like sitting over coffee with a charming, well-read friend whose penchant for gentle melancholy only makes him better company."--Jennifer Howard, Times Literary Supplement "Mr. Nunokawa cobbles a liturgy from the Western canon, and his notes resemble homilies in which he strives after secular consolations."--Jeremy Axelrod, Wall Street Journal "[A] winning look at how people connect, or attempt to connect, in person and online."--Publishers Weekly "Whitmanesque... Looking to befriend the reader yet not exactly open a conversation, Nunokawa draws one in with these temptingly lyric essays while resisting the larger buffers of narrative or explicit chronological context. An engaging multimedia project offering even more food for thought when translated to the linearity of the printed page."--Kirkus "The Facebook revolution has given rise to a new art form, the digital essay. At the forefront, Jeff Nunokawa and his Note Book (Princeton) will turn haters into lovers"--Vanity Fair "A beautifully crafted book... Nunokawa's take on [Facebook] ... is like none I have seen."--Jacqueline Cutler, Newark Star Ledger "These essays from a Hawaiian-born professor of literature, Jeff Nunokawa, have left me utterly charmed"--Nicholas Blincoe, Daily Telegraph "Note Book is the handsome record of a project consciously poised between codex and pixel. The physical manifestation of a years-long experiment by ... Jeff Nunokawa, Note Book is just that: a book made out of daily Facebook posts, written using the platform's rarely used Notes feature, which allows users to write at length... What makes Nunokawa's efforts so different is their crafted quality and the reservoir of intelligence, knowledge and feeling from which they are drawn. [These] essays should leave us hopeful that every new iteration of social media is built by us and merely awaits infusions of subversive thought, rough and ready democracy, and moral fervor."--Geordie Williamson, The Australian
Table of Contents*Frontmatter, pg. i*CONTENTS, pg. v*Note Book: Initial Public Offering, pg. xv*August 2007, pg. 1*October 2007, pg. 2*November 2007, pg. 3*December 2007, pg. 4*January 2008, pg. 5*March 2008, pg. 7*April 2008, pg. 10*May 2008, pg. 13*October 2008, pg. 16*November 2008, pg. 18*December 2008, pg. 21*January 2009, pg. 24*February 2009, pg. 25*March 2009, pg. 29*April 2009, pg. 32*May 2009, pg. 35*July 2009, pg. 38*August 2009, pg. 41*September 2009, pg. 42*October 2009, pg. 46*December 2009, pg. 48*July 2010, pg. 50*July 2010, pg. 52*December 2010, pg. 53*July 2011, pg. 54*August 2011, pg. 56*September 2011, pg. 59*October 2011, pg. 62*November 2011, pg. 68*December 2011, pg. 70*January 2012, pg. 72*February 2012, pg. 78*March 2012, pg. 84*April 2012, pg. 91*May 2012, pg. 97*June 2012, pg. 102*July 2012, pg. 108*August 2012, pg. 116*September 2012, pg. 121*October 2012, pg. 133*November 2012, pg. 143*December 2012, pg. 154*January 2013, pg. 163*February 2013, pg. 165*March 2013, pg. 173*April 2013, pg. 181*June 2013, pg. 188*July 2013, pg. 192*August 2013, pg. 206*September 2013, pg. 221*October 2013, pg. 234*November 2013, pg. 251*December 2013, pg. 269*January 2014, pg. 285*February 2014, pg. 300*March 2014, pg. 305*April 2014, pg. 308*May 2014, pg. 309*June 2014, pg. 312*July 2014, pg. 314*Index, pg. 321
