Time, Now

Booker-nominated author Claire Messud makes a timely, impassioned argument for the importance of narrative in the age of digital overwhelm

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift' RACHEL CUSK 'We are experiencing a sudden shift: of Time and Space, of the nature of reality, of our relationships to others and ourselves. The consequences are at once liberating and deeply confounding.' A writing professor asks her students to share a childhood memory. They are stranded: all they can recall are family videos, photos resurfaced by an algorithm - moments already framed before they became memories at all. For the last one hundred years, technology has shaped not only how we communicate but how we experience time itself. Today, the past returns to us in curated feeds and automated reminders: an unceasing, untethered stream of content. If we lose touch with the concept of narrative, how will we articulate the future and guard against the nihilism of an eternal present? Claire Messud's urgent manifesto argues that we must recapture our forward momentum from the digital forces that consume us - and reclaim what makes us most human.