{"id":4268,"date":"2014-04-08T05:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780385537650"},"modified":"2014-04-08T05:30:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T05:30:00","slug":"the-word-exchange-by-alena-graedon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/2014\/04\/08\/the-word-exchange-by-alena-graedon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780385537650\"><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/catalog_cover.pperl?9780385537650\" border=\"1\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780385537650\">The Word Exchange<\/a> A Novel<br \/><b>Written by<\/b> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/author\/results.pperl?authorid=175112\">Alena Graedon<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><b>Hardcover<\/b>, 384 pages | Doubleday | Fiction &#8211; Technological; Fiction &#8211; Literary; Fiction &#8211; Dystopian | <b>$26.95<\/b> | April 8, 2014 | 978-0-385-53765-0 (0-385-53765-4)<\/p>\n<p><p><b><b>A dystopian novel for the digital age, <i>The Word Exchange <\/i>offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power&nbsp;of the printed word.<\/b><br \/><\/b><br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted &ldquo;death of print&rdquo; has become a reality.&nbsp;Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are&nbsp;things of the past, and we spend our time glued to&nbsp;handheld devices called Memes that not only keep&nbsp;us in constant communication but also have become&nbsp;so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our&nbsp;offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry&nbsp;stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.<br \/>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the <i>North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL<\/i>), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate&mdash;or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the <i>NADEL<\/i> offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It&rsquo;s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm&rsquo;s way. And thus begins Anana&rsquo;s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . .<br \/>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Joined by Bart, her bookish <i>NADEL<\/i> colleague,&nbsp;Anana&rsquo;s search for Doug will take her into dark &nbsp;basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks&nbsp;and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and&nbsp;secret meetings of the underground resistance, the&nbsp;Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father&rsquo;s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called &ldquo;word flu&rdquo; spreads, <i>The&nbsp;Word Exchange <\/i>becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on&nbsp;the high cultural costs of digital technology.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Word Exchange A NovelWritten by Alena GraedonHardcover, 384 pages | Doubleday | Fiction &#8211; Technological; Fiction &#8211; Literary; Fiction &#8211; Dystopian | $26.95 | April 8, 2014 | 978-0-385-53765-0 (0-385-53765-4)A dystopian novel for the digital age, The &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}