Atlantic to publish Gabbert's 'quietly forceful' essay collection

Atlantic will publish Elisa Gabbert's essay collection, The Unreality of Memory, next year. 

James Roxburgh, Atlantic senior editor, acquired UK Commonwealth (excluding Canada) from Devon Mazzone at FSG. Atlantic will publish in hardback and ebook in Autumn 2020.

"From the quiet horror of the Kelpies up in Scotland to a reappraisal of the treatment of witches, from the scale and threat of geological precarity to that of the atom bomb, The Unreality of Memory is a stunning collection of essays about disaster culture and human failure," said Atlantic. 

Roxburgh said: "Elisa Gabbert gathers and interprets the world in an extraordinary way, one that makes me pause, reconsider, rethink my place in a given context, gently move the arc of my intention. Her collection is one of the most quietly forceful and intelligent books I’ve encountered."

Gabbert is a poet and essayist and the author of four collections: The Word Pretty, L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, The Self Unstable and The French Exit. The Word Pretty was a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read among others.