The marginalia are the lens through which Ship of Theseus is colored. It comes complete with library sticker and check-out pocket inside the cover.

One layer out, Eric stole the physical copy of Ship of Theseus in readers’ hands from the Laguna Verde High School library long ago. The tale involves quite a bit of extended allegory referencing organized crime and labor unions in Spain, and reading it feels like slipping into a dream. The novel-within-the-novel follows an unnamed man who experiences a long amnesiac episode while aboard a ship that eventually docks. Straka penned before he or she stopped publishing. presents several layers to unpack, so let’s start with Ship of Theseus, the 19th and final novel V.M. Tucked throughout the book are postcards, photographs, newspaper clippings - even a map drawn on a napkin. Straka, whom no one actually knew and the margin notes written by Eric, a disgruntled former graduate student, and Jen, a precocious undergrad. is almost two books in one - a novel entitled Ship of Theseus by a reclusive, mysterious author named V.M. ( Abrams conceived the story, and Dorst wrote it.) S. One of the best contemporary examples is S. (2013) by film director J.J. Ergodic works don’t spoon-feed readers the way typical books do. Such a book might include inserts or require readers to hunt for clues among pictures or to rotate the spine to keep reading. In Aarseth’s theory, the medium through which a story is told is as important as the story itself. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Jonathan Safron Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013). Aarseth to encompass books that require a “non-trivial effort” by readers to understand the text by becoming active participants in the telling of the story. These books are called “ ergodic literature,” a term coined by the Norwegian academic Espen J. Sometimes a book is a lot more than a book.

Ship of theseus novel