Tom Comitta at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes TOM COMITTA—author and artist—for a discussion of their new novel The Nature Book. They will be joined in conversation by NICK MONTFORT—poet, artist, and professor of digital media at MIT.

A Return to In-Person Events

Harvard Book Store is excited to be back to in-person programming. To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone in attendance, the following Covid-19 safety protocols will be in place at all of our Harvard Book Store events until further notice:

• Face coverings are required of all staff and attendees when inside the store. Masks must snugly cover nose and mouth.

About The Nature Book

What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction’s traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.

Praise for The Nature Book

“A magnum opus about the planet using only found text. . . . A dynamic and singular reading experience.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Here it is at last, and what a bloody relief to at last have it: The Novel Without Us. Using the suprasensory medium of the human vessel Tom Comitta, the trees and sky and earth have accessed the hyperobject or hyperartifact known as ‘literature’ in order to be heard from, across time and space. This is a novel to dwarf all others.” —Jonathan Lethem

“Tom Comitta’s original novel—composed of descriptions of animals, plants, weather, water, earth, time and space from canonical English-language works—is a feat of conceptual art, biblical in tone and panoramic in scope. The absence of human life in The Nature Book is a relief and a delight, yet Comitta’s devotion to the ‘ancillary’ builds a subtle and uncomfortable portrait of human consciousness: its judgments and observations, its habit of projecting itself into the minds of animals, and its tendency to see the natural world in terms of how it resembles, serves, or threatens the human one.” —Kathryn Scanlan

“In The Nature Book, language denuded from its original context serves its own surprising ends. An astounding project.” —Jarett Kobek