Books
The Business of Memory:
The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting
Essays (1999)
edited by Charles Baxter
In the current information age, "memory" is as likely to be an attribute of a computer as a human being. In Graywolf Forum Three, The Business of Memory, editor Charles Baxter invites twelve creative writers to contemplate the externalization of what was once so deeply personal. The resulting essays address a provocative range of topics: the explosion of interest in the memoir; the recovered-memory movement; America in the grip of an "amnesia plague;" the need for coherent stories of our past to help us organize our present, and forgetfulness—political, cultural, and literary—and the shame and allure it holds. Throughout, these fascinating pieces illuminate the art of remembering in a time when memory had become a highly measurable commodity.
