The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting

In the current information age, “memory” is as likely to be an attribute of a computer as a human being. In Graywolf Forum 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 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 has become a highly measurable commodity.

Charles Baxter
Richard Bausch
Karen Brennan
Bernard Cooper
Lydia Davis
Steve Erickson
Alvin Greenberg
Patricia Hampl
Margot Livesey
James A. McPherson
Victoria Morrow
Michael Ryan
Sylvia Watanabe