Dioramas

"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." --