No matter how much you fight it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. It is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces, and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention the dust mites who make it their home. Dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"). Michael Marder's Dust delves into one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, finding in it a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today -- Inside cover flap.