AUDIOBOOK
About
A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word.
In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted "death of print" has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are a thing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called memes that not only keep us in constant communication but have become so intuitive as to hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.
Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language, where he is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate-or even actually spoke to one another. One evening, Doug disappears, leaving a single written clue: ALICE-a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm's way. Thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Joined by Bart, her bookish colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into dark basement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the anonymous Diachronic Society, the boardrooms of the evil online retailing site Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary-spiritual home of the written word. As Ana pieces together what is going on, and Bart gets sicker and sicker with the strange "word flu" that has spread worldwide and causes people to speak in gibberish, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the price of technology and the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age. Title Info. Dedication. Part I: Thesis. A: Alice
B: Bartleby
C: Communication
D: Dictionary
E: Empanada
F: Father
G: G-d
H: Heuristic
Track 9I: I
Part II: Antithesis. J: Jackknife
K: King
L: Logomachy
M: Meme
N: Names as Such
O: OE
P: Pineapple
Q: Queasiness
R: Rock and Roll
Part III: Synthesis. S: Silence
T: Torture
U: Unsayable
V: Visitation
W: Word
X: X
Y: You
Z: 0
"Alena Graedon's
spectacular debut is a story for our age of 'accelerated
obsolescence.' A genuinely scary and funny mystery about linguistic
slippage and disturbance, it's also a moving meditation on our sometimes comic,
sometimes desperate struggles to speak and to listen and to mean something to
one another. To borrow Graedon's own invention, The Word Exchange is 'Synchronic'-a
gorgeous genre mash-up that offers
readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance, and philosophy. It's
an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language."
"[A] fast-paced, thrill-a-minute
début novel…The sonic pleasures of Graedon's degraded language are considerable…She
creates a powerful sense of mystery…[I] raced greedily to the last page,
enjoying Graedon's plot-weaving every step of the way."
"Clever, breathless, and sportively Hegelian in theme, The Word Exchange
combines the jaunty energy of youngish adult fiction with the spine-tingling chill of the science fiction conspiracy
genre…Graedon makes you wring your hands for her heroine-and tremble for
the future of the English language throughout her twenty-six chapters,
achieving the singular feat of turning the alphabet into a cliffhanger.
As much fun as Graedon has with her Borgesian doomsday scenario, her
novel folds serious meditations on language and society into its
manhunt."
"[Graedon] knows how to ratchet up
mystery. In [her] dystopian future, face-to-face interfacing is finished and
even email is a fading memory."
"A sobering look a
In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted "death of print" has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are a thing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called memes that not only keep us in constant communication but have become so intuitive as to hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.
Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language, where he is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate-or even actually spoke to one another. One evening, Doug disappears, leaving a single written clue: ALICE-a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm's way. Thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Joined by Bart, her bookish colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into dark basement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the anonymous Diachronic Society, the boardrooms of the evil online retailing site Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary-spiritual home of the written word. As Ana pieces together what is going on, and Bart gets sicker and sicker with the strange "word flu" that has spread worldwide and causes people to speak in gibberish, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the price of technology and the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age. Title Info. Dedication. Part I: Thesis. A: Alice
B: Bartleby
C: Communication
D: Dictionary
E: Empanada
F: Father
G: G-d
H: Heuristic
Track 9I: I
Part II: Antithesis. J: Jackknife
K: King
L: Logomachy
M: Meme
N: Names as Such
O: OE
P: Pineapple
Q: Queasiness
R: Rock and Roll
Part III: Synthesis. S: Silence
T: Torture
U: Unsayable
V: Visitation
W: Word
X: X
Y: You
Z: 0
"Alena Graedon's
spectacular debut is a story for our age of 'accelerated
obsolescence.' A genuinely scary and funny mystery about linguistic
slippage and disturbance, it's also a moving meditation on our sometimes comic,
sometimes desperate struggles to speak and to listen and to mean something to
one another. To borrow Graedon's own invention, The Word Exchange is 'Synchronic'-a
gorgeous genre mash-up that offers
readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance, and philosophy. It's
an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language."
"[A] fast-paced, thrill-a-minute
début novel…The sonic pleasures of Graedon's degraded language are considerable…She
creates a powerful sense of mystery…[I] raced greedily to the last page,
enjoying Graedon's plot-weaving every step of the way."
"Clever, breathless, and sportively Hegelian in theme, The Word Exchange
combines the jaunty energy of youngish adult fiction with the spine-tingling chill of the science fiction conspiracy
genre…Graedon makes you wring your hands for her heroine-and tremble for
the future of the English language throughout her twenty-six chapters,
achieving the singular feat of turning the alphabet into a cliffhanger.
As much fun as Graedon has with her Borgesian doomsday scenario, her
novel folds serious meditations on language and society into its
manhunt."
"[Graedon] knows how to ratchet up
mystery. In [her] dystopian future, face-to-face interfacing is finished and
even email is a fading memory."
"A sobering look a