A Primer for Forgetting
Getting Past the Past
Book
Paperback/Softback
384 pages
978-1-78689-744-2 (ISBN)
Description
We live in a culture that prizes memory - how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear, but rather as a blessing and a balm?
A Primer for Forgetting forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern. Combining scholarship, autobiography and social criticism, this is a unique and remarkable synthesis.
A Primer for Forgetting forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern. Combining scholarship, autobiography and social criticism, this is a unique and remarkable synthesis.
Reviews / Votes
An absorbing exploration of memory, creative freedom and the importance of forgetting . . . wonderfully inventive . . . intriguing and original * * Guardian * * In A Primer for Forgetting, that bold yet gentle intellectual adventurer, Lewis Hyde, harrows the bottomless mysteries of memory and forgetting, trauma and recovery, amnesia and commemoration, reconciliation and forgiveness. If this deep, poignant, soulful, inquisitive, gently tragic and disarmingly erudite book were nine times longer, I would still have felt sad when I realized it was coming to an end -- MICHAEL CHABON The sequence of Lewis Hyde's brilliant cultural interventions here reaches a new height, but also a new level of intimacy and compassion. The book feels not so much written as "unforgotten" onto the page, out of our collective desire to rescue the world -- JONATHAN LETHEM Lewis Hyde's new book is so counterintuitive, so bracingly clear and fresh, that reading it is like leaping into a cold lake on a hot hike. It shocks the mind. It flushes all kinds of monotony and mental fatigue right out of your system * * Wall Street Journal * * Praise for Trickster Makes This World: This book is a revelation * * The Times * * A modern classic . . . which celebrates the power of disruptive imagination * * Guardian * * A glorious grab-bag stuffed with necessary loot, a joyful plum pudding rich in treasures -- MARGARET ATWOOD * * Los Angeles Times * * An act of pure pleasure from first to last -- MICHAEL CHABON Hyde is one of our true superstars of non-fiction . . . Both brilliant (intellectually, literarily) and wise (psychologically, spiritually, you-name-itally) -- DAVID FOSTER WALLACE A masterpiece . . . The thrilling thing about reading non-fiction such as Hyde's is not just that it gives you new thoughts: it also changes the way you think * * Scotland on Sunday * *More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Illustrations
23 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78689-744-2 (9781786897442)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. In addition to The Gift, he is the author of Trickster Makes This World; Common as Air; A Primer for Forgetting; and a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. He has also published two volumes of translations of Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre's poetry and is the editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, Hyde was the Richard L. Thomas Professor in Creative Writing at Kenyon College until his retirement in 2018. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman.
lewishyde.com
lewishyde.com