'A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery' Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less 'Masterly... Her essays have a clarity and prescience that imply a sort of distant, retrospective view, like postcards sent from the near future' New York Times We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase 'Did you see?' The feeling that we're living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten. Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory consists of a series of lyrical and deeply researched meditations on what our culture of catastrophe has done to public discourse and our own inner lives. In these tender and prophetic essays, she focuses in on our daily preoccupation and favorite pasttime: desperate distraction from disaster by way of a desperate obsession with the disastrous. Moving from public trauma to personal tragedy, from the Titanic and Chernobyl to illness