In-Store: Craig Mod: Things Become Other Things w/ Lynne Tillman

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/cAFKKbgzSh8
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

A transformative 300-mile walk along Japan's ancient pilgrimage routes and through depopulating villages inspires a heart-rending remembrance of a long-lost friend, documented in poignant, imaginative prose and remarkable photography.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the Covid shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes – the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age 19, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
Through the frame of a 300-mile-long pilgrimage walk, Things Become Other Things folds together history, literature, poetry, Shinto and Buddhist spirituality, and contemporary rural life in Japan via dozens of conversations with aging fishermen, multi-generational inn owners, farmers, and kissaten cafe “mamas.” Along the way, Mod communes with mountain fauna, marvels over evidence of bears and boars, and hopscotches around leeches. He encounters whispering priests and foul-mouthed little kids who ask him "just what the heck are you, anyway?" Through sharp prose and his curious archive of photographs, he records evidence of floods and tsunamis, the disappearance of life on the peninsula, and the capricious fecundity of nature.
Things Become Other Things blends memoir and travel writing at their best, transporting readers to an otherwise inaccessible Japan, one only made visible through Mod’s unique bicultural lens.

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of four books, including Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He is also the author of the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.

Lynne Tillman's latest novel is Men and Apparitions. Her most recent book, MOTHERCARE, is an autobiographical essay on caregiving. Her essays and stories appear in Aperture, Bookforum, Frieze, N+1, Granta, Tank, and in art catalogs, artist books, and other magazines. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Foundation arts Writers Grant, and The Academy of Arts and Letters Katherine Anne Porter Prize for contributions to literature. She lives in New York with the bassist David Hofstra.

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