"In a city far in the future, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. A line of mosquitos in uniforms and reglia, honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world - the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass. After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins ets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. In this hybrid novel - part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative - Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost." -- Back cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.