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The Age of Loneliness: Essays by Laura Marris

Greywolf Press, 2024

Filled with equal parts alienation and wonder, each essay immerses readers in a different strange landscape of the Eremocene. Among them are the Buffalo airport with its snowy owls and the purgatories of commuter flights, layovers, and long-distance relationships; a life-size model city built solely for self-driving cars; the coasts of New England and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and horseshoe crabs; and the Connecticut woods Marris revisits for the first time after her father’s death, where she participates in the annual Christmas Bird Count and encounters presence and absence in turn.

Vivid, keenly observed, and driven by a lively and lyrical voice, The Age of Loneliness is a moving examination of the dangers of loneliness, the surprising histories of ecological loss, and the ways that community science—which relies on the embodied evidence of “ground truth”—can help us recognize, and maybe even recover, what we’ve learned to live without.

“The Age of Loneliness is a gorgeous, poignant guide to finding one another in a time of loss.”

— Michelle Nijhuis

“The Age of Loneliness calls to us from our era of extinction like a bird we thought we had lost. Laura Marris is a prophet whose patient song calls us to attention, to mercy, and finally, to each other.”

—Tomás Q. Morín

“These are essays of exquisite beauty. The Age of Loneliness is an exploration of landscapes, interior and exterior, and the ways they become imprinted with both wounding and healing. As Marris reckons with the loneliness of late capitalism, what emerges is a work of love and connection.”

—Kathryn Savage

LAURA MARRIS is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.

Her translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague (Knopf). With Alice Kaplan, she is also the co-author of a book of criticism about the novel called States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (University of Chicago Press, with a French edition translated by Patrick Hersant for Gallimard). She has translated Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark (New York Review Books), Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan and Other Poems (with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press), Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget (Scribner), Jean-Yves Frétigné’s To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci (University of Chicago Press), Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House (University of Chicago Press), as well as a Proust comic book and experimental translation projects for Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Lukas Prizes, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University at Buffalo and a Teaching Artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.