The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss

Jonathan Lethem is perhaps our most active literary voice mining the genre margins of our culture.  In this unique collection he creates an anthology that no one else could.  He draws on the work of such unforgettables as Julio Cortazar, who presents a man caught between the ancient and modern worlds unable to say which is real; Philip K. Dick, who tells the story of a man trapped on a spaceship of the somnolent, unable to sleep and slowly losing his mind; Shirley Jackson, who takes us on a nightmarish trip across town with a young secretary; and Oliver Sacks, who presents us with an aging hippie who possesses no memory of anything that has taken place since the early seventies.What Lethem has done is nothing less than define a new genre of literature-the amnesia story-and in the process he invites us to sit down, pick up the book, and begin to forget.Also including: John Franklin Bardin, Donald Barthelme, Thomas M. Disch, Karn Joy Fowler, David Grand, Anna Kavan, Haruki Murakami, Flann O’Brien, Edmund White, and many others.

Includes:

Dream science by Thomas Palmer
The night fave up by Julio Cortazar
Other people by Martin Amis
Nightmare by Shirley Jackson
Memories of amnesia by Lawrence Shainberg
Warm by Robert Sheckley
Soul walker by Brian Fawcett
Cowboys don’t cry by L.J. Davis
The second coming by Walker Percy
Funes, his memory by Jorge Luis Borges
The black curtain by Cornell Woolrich
The third policeman by Flann O’Brien
Five fucks by Jonathan Lethem
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
The last hippie by Oliver Sacks
Notes toward a history of the seventies by Geoffrey O’Brien
Ticket to ride by Dennis Potter
The fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian uprising, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and the realm of raging winds by Haruki Murakami
Geoffrey Sonnabend’s obliscence: theories of forgetting and the problem of matter-an encapsulation by Valentine Worth
I hope I shall arrive soon by Philip K. Dick
The zebra struck by Anna Kavan
The squirrel cage by Thomas M. Disch
Louse by David Grand
Game by Donald Barthelme
The affirmation by Christopher Priest by Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban
Days between stations by Steve Ericson
That in Aleppo once by Vladimir Nabokov
Carnation, lily, lily, rose by Kelly Link