Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts

When walking down the street, it is not uncommon to see lost items that have escaped their proper receptacles, but how often does one stop to read the messages left behind? David Lazar has stopped often, capturing the pieces of a ＂lost world on the streets＂ and thinking about the life of the discarder from the fragments left behind.

Stories of the Street is a series of imaginative meditations--through prose poems, short-short essays, microfictions, and prose pieces without precise genre distinction--of what it means to encounter lost or discarded texts. Rather than simply deconstructing the lists, notes, receipts, or book pages he finds strewn in various cities, Lazar uses them as suggestive, capable of inspiring possible narratives that are at most latent in the text itself. The encounter, then, is an encounter with oneself and the mysteries of cities, where detritus frequently doubles as a sign saying, ＂Consider this.＂ Lazar’s narrative voice ranges in tone from the comically antic to the melancholy. By photographing what he describes as ＂messages that had escaped their bottles＂ on-location as found, Lazar has become a flaneur of paper debris, puzzling over the evidence of urban human life.

David Lazar is the author or editor of numerous books, including Celeste Holm Syndrome (Nebraska, 2020); I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms (Nebraska, 2017); Truth in Nonfiction; Occasional Desire: Essays (Nebraska, 2013); and The Body of Brooklyn.