SERENDIPITY

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE OBJECT

Fall 2024 | Reaktion Books | 224 pages | 87 Illustrations, 78 in colour

“Welcoming us into the afterlife of the happy accident, Carol Mavor’s poetic ruminations reveal a cavalcade of surprising connections between a diverse array of images and objects. In the process, Serendipity reflects on the magical power of writing itself, on the capacity of the learned essayist to take us on dizzying flights of fancy and into profound depths of understanding.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford

An exploration of the sadness, as well as the joy, of unexpected discoveries in history and life.

Carol Mavor’s first “happy accident” occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favored by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature.

This book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War; Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra.

Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic—but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.