A Book is Born: The Pleasure of Texting
Lynne Huffer (Emory) and Mario Telò (Berkeley) had long admired one another's work, but always at a distance. The two met in person for the first time in fall 2025, when Huffer visited the Bay Area. A Saturday trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sparked the first of what would become thousands of texting exchanges, ranging from reflections on the banalities of daily life to sustained philosophical conversations. This text chain eventually became the basis for their coauthored book, The Pleasure of Texting: Sapphic Writing and Reading at the Edge of the World, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
The Pleasure of Texting explores what it means to think across different intellectual, academic, and personal experiences. The authors' collaboration takes the form of a poetic riffing in which intellectual difference becomes generative. The rhythms of digital communication — with its waiting, gaps, and moments of connection — become part of the writing itself. The result is not a fusion of two voices but a juxtapositional form in which the authors play off of one another.
In conversation with their editor, Ryan Kendall (Duke UP), Huffer and Telò explore the capacity of texting as a new model of collaborative writing, in which quotidian, obsessive texting is shaped into paragraphs, chapters, and eventually a book.
