Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning explores the human impulse to make things-and the meanings we discover in the process.
Writing from the industrial landscape of the American Midwest, Susan Neville considers the relationships among work, art, invention, memory, and belief. Moving between factories and family histories, machinery and imagination, these literary essays explore the mysteries of craftsmanship and the ways ordinary objects reveal larger questions about human experience.
Originally published in 2001, Fabrication returns in a revised and expanded edition featuring a new essay, "The Posters of the South Shore Line," illustrated with vintage railroad posters, and a new afterword.
At once personal, philosophical, and deeply attentive to the material world, Fabrication asks what the things we make can tell us about who we are-and what we value.