Exhalation

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Dadu.

A note from the Najeebah Al-Ghadban, the designer of Exhalation:

This special edition of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation utilizes color and illustration throughout its design to enter and create an otherworldly realm. The illustrations, by artist Dadu Shin, establish all that is painterly and human while the interruption of blue gradations of color, both in the text and on the page, expose a multidimensional plane within the confines of the very flat and physical page. Color here stands in place of time and light, and through the breadth of its shades and uses, highlights and exposes the subtleties of the worlds Ted builds in his collection of stories. 

About the Book:

A merchant in medieval Baghdad is given the opportunity to revisit his greatest mistake. An anatomist who is made of metal and breathes argon decides to dissect his own brain. A woman and a man spend years fulfilling their responsibilities to the software children they created. A journalist wrestles with the way technology shapes our ideas of what truth is. An archaeologist who studies evidence that the Earth was recently created encounters something she can’t explain. A therapist counsels people obsessed with what their alternate selves have done.

These are characters we can relate to, whether the worlds they inhabit resemble our own or not. Like us, they are fascinated with the world; like us, they are trying to use what they’ve learned in their quest to live a meaningful life.

“If a story helps us through a deliberation, we owe something to it even though its events didn’t take place in our universe. Considered in this light, multiple selves and speculative responsibilities turn out not to be all that abstruse; what Chiang has done is take the idea of fiction seriously.” – Caleb Crain, The New York Review of Books

Table of Contents:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
• Exhalation
• What’s Expected of Us
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
• The Great Silence
• Omphalos
• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
• Story Notes
• Acknowledgments

Limited: 300 signed numbered hardcover copies

Lettered: 26 signed, specially bound copies, housed in a custom traycase