"For most of us, time spent in airports is filled with inconvenience, discomfort, and often explicit insult to our psychological well-being. Reading Christopher Schaberg's The Textual Life of Airports is guaranteed to dispel your tedium and inspire you to join along with him in a rich foray of cultural inquiries about these colossi and the complex narratives they convey.  From the canon of airport reading to aesthetic images of baggage, from the resonances of 9/11 to the semiotic absence and presence of birds in the terminals, Schaberg approaches airports with a keen critical energy that will make you welcome your next four-hour layover in Atlanta or your missed connection in Newark as an opportunity to explore his fascinating insights.  I have sometimes felt that all the good topics in cultural studies have been exhausted; this book restores my faith that fertile ground remains.  I savored every paragraph." -- Randy Malamud, Professor of English, Georgia State University, USA, and author of Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (Macmillan and NYU Press, 1998) and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Palgrave 2003).