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as well as poetry. Who am I kidding? he said. The novel is a dying animal, too. In twenty years no one will read books anymore. I’ll be food for worms, but what are you going to do? Such words of inspiration cost me over ten thousand dollars a year. This same advisor hadn’t published a book in a decade, but he had tenure and lots of opinions, so I took my cacophony of voices, my tales of fools and outcasts trying to find a home in the world, put them all in the same small town, gave them jobs at the five-and-dime and the local bar, and in the last story—“The Conflagration” —threw them together at a party at the town hotel, where a fire breaks out and my heroes are forced to act or flee. It’s a cheap ending to a ragbag of a book, which is why A Brief History of the Fool sits under a pile of sweaters in the darkest corner of my closet.
    Little did I know that the work-study Lakeside arranged for me would become my safety net. In my third semester there, in 2004, I got assigned to pull and load books into trucks for the monolithic search engine Imego, which had chosen Lakeside, among other universities, as partner in the Imego Library Project. Soon I was working evenings and weekends at the Imego warehouse in West Town. It seemed innocent enough at the time. We unloaded books, ran them under robotic scanners, or shipped them off to Bangalore to be scanned and returned on the cheap, then sent them back to the libraries they’d come from. And though friends from my MFA cohort needled me for speeding the demise of the physical book, I didn’t care because the job offered full-time summer work and opportunities beyond graduation—and if it weren’t for the project I never would have fallen in love with Dhara Patel.
    As regional coordinator for Imego Books, Dhara played a role in her company’s plan to digitize over thirty million volumes from twenty-five thousand libraries around the world—pretty much everything ever bound and printed on paper. She traveled from the warehouse and her office in downtown Chicago to universities around the Great Lakes to make sure that libraries were sending their books and people like me were moving apace. We kissed for the first time to the sound of the robotic scanner turning the pages of John D. MacDonald’s Ballroom of the Skies . On our second anniversary as a couple, I tracked down a copy of the book, a sci-fi novel from 1952 about an intergalactic romance. We read lines of stilted dialogue to each other as we drank champagne and fell into bed. The following year we had much to toast. Dhara was promoted to affiliate sales manager, continuing her rise up the ranks; she convinced management to hire me into her old position; and on January 1, 2008, we were married, at her family’s motel, in a watered-down Gujarati ceremony.
    I had hoped, by the time I turned off I-55 onto Lake Shore Drive, almost home after five full days in Normal, to have mustered the courage to confess, but I still couldn’t bring myself to tell Dhara about my father’s decision. “We’re still working on it,” I had said as late as that morning, talking on the cell phone with one hand while instructing movers with the other. I’d called some assisted-living places around Normal and Chicago, but couldn’t imagine adding three thousand dollars a month to my debts. I’d tried the rental office at Harbor City, the iconic downtown towers better known as “the Honeycombs,” where Dhara and I lived, and considered signing a lease on the only available one-bedroom apartment. But I had no idea how I could afford another twelve hundred dollars a month, or the two thousand I’d have to pay the graduate-student movers who even now were packing the foreclosed house and hauling the contents of the junk-filled garage to a storage locker in Little Italy.
    Though my father was the stubbornest man I knew, I assumed he was out of money