Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, this book confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences.
In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters "n" and "b," and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history's relationship to the body's fictions - what "n" and "b" term 'art lost to numbers.'
