From the earliest airfields to the post-9/11 turn, this book investigates how airports figure in the American cultural imagination. >

A sequel and companion to the groundbreaking The Textual Life of Airports, The End of Airports combines critical theory, cultural studies, and media studies to encourage readers to think differently about contemporary air travel.

Airportness takes the reader on a single day's journey through all the routines and stages of an ordinary flight. From curbside to baggage, and pondering the minutes and hours of sitting in between, Christopher Schaberg contemplates the mundane world of commercial aviation to discover "the nature of flight.†? For Schaberg this means hearing planes in the sky, recognizing airline symbols in unlikely places, and navigating the various zones of transit from sliding doors, to jet bridge, to lavatory. It is an ongoing, swarming ecosystem that unfolds each day as we fly, get stranded, and arrive at our destinations. Airportness turns out to be more than just architecture and design elements-rather, it is all the rumble and buzz of flight, the tedium of travel as well as the feelings of uplift.

In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson

Caleb Marcus is a Peacemaker, a roving lawman tasked with maintaining the peace and bringing control to magic users on the frontier. A Peacemaker isn’t supposed to take a life—but sometimes, it’s kill or be killed... After a war injury left him half-scoured of his power, Caleb and his jackalope familiar have been shipped out West, keeping them out of sight and out of the way of more useful agents. And while life in the wild isn’t exactly Caleb’s cup of tea, he can’t deny that being amongst folk who aren’t as powerful as he is, even in his poor shape, is a bit of a relief. But Hope isn’t like the other small towns he’s visited. The children are being mysteriously robbed of their magical capabilities. There’s something strange and dark about the local land baron who runs the school. Cheyenne tribes are raiding the outlying homesteads with increasing frequency and strange earthquakes keep shaking the very ground Hope stands on. Something’s gone very wrong in the Wild West, and it’s up to Caleb to figure out what’s awry before he ends up at the end of the noose—or something far worse...

This book is not just about air travel. It is about the emergent social world of flying. It concerns air space and behavior in the air the way someone else might look at cities and street behavior. Economic, political, and cultural aspects are all considered. . . . Airports have now become specific places in their own right that, in a certain sense, now. . . are very much like cities. Frequent flying also has produced its very own culture. Rules of behavior are subscribed to in the air. Unique behaviors at terminals and in the passenger cabin have emerged that contrast with life on the ground. In chapters below I explore these interesting aspects of etiquette, eroticism, and bi-coastalism, a human activity that is only possible because of our present society's evolution. . . . Only now have we begun to appreciate our emergent global culture. The world is shrinking just as the opportunities for travel expand. -from the Introduction

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Art of Travel spends a week at an airport in a wittily intriguing meditation on the "non-place" that he believes is the centre of our civilization. In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. Based on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships, and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious "non-place," which by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, "air-side," and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think.