The Vanishing Map A Journey from L.A. to Tokyo to the Heart of Europe

Stephen Barber takes the reader on an extraordinary journey from LA to Tokyo via Europe. He carries only a crumpled map in his pocket, a map which plots a horrifying past, a disappearing present and a future collapsing into banality. A virtual reality flight across this territory reveals the surfaces of things, a landscape made by war and technological advances. Coming back to earth and to his own body, Stephen Barber follows the map from city to city. He discovers how cities, once densely layered with a civilization's history of follies and obsessions, are increasingly oblivious places, accelerating the erasure of their own histories, forgetting themselves. Barber's journey becomes a profound meditation on the future of the city and the role of memory in our lives.Dazzlingly written, erudite, and by turns funny, elegiac and horrific, The Vanishing Map explores what cities were, are and will be. Deeper than this, it questions how memory - personal, urban, national and global memory - can survive.

Stephen Barber is a noted cultural historian and author of many acclaimed books, including Burning World, the best-selling biography of Edmund White, Tokyo Vertigo, Caligula: Divine Carnage, Projected Cities, Jean Genet, Fragments of the European City and two studies of Antonin Artaud, The Screaming Body and Blows And Bombs. His writing has won many awards and been translated into Japanese, French, German and Italian. Formerly Professor of Digital Media at the University of Tokyo, he is currently Professor of Media Arts at Kingston University.