National Network for Equitable Library Service

Nilling is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. Lisa Robertson applies an acute eye to the subject of reading and writing—two elemental forces that, she suggests, cannot be separated.For Robertson, a book is an intimacy, and with keen and insightful language, Nilling's essays builds into a lively yet close conversation with Robertson's "masters": past writers, philosophers, and idealists who have guided her reading (and writing) practice to this point.If "a reader is a beginner," then even regular readers of Robertson's kind of deep thinking will delight in the infinite folding together of concepts—the codex, pornography, melancholy, cities—that on their own may seem banal, but in their twisting intertextuality, make for a scintillating study of reading as a deep engagement.