A Primer for Forgetting
Getting Past the Past

not really sure about the lukewarm takes, I thought this was excellent. The format is certainly unusual for a work of nonfiction - it sort of imitates (to me) David Markson’s “This Is Not a Novel” series, and the format itself is a practice of memory and forgetting. Some of the takes were definitely......more

This was one of the most intellectually stimulating books I've read in a long while; it put me back in the days when I was a philosophy student, thinking always about big, overarching, challenging ideas. Lewis Hyde, I learned, is among other things a poet, and this is evident in the mode in which th......more

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art is my favorite book on the once-fashionable subject of “creativity.” It’s a sparkling example of what it claims to analyze, playful, wide-ranging, trangressive, inventive. Lewis Hyde’s new book is quite different — it’s an extended meditation on th......more

It might have been four stars, but I forgot. This was an interesting exercise in collage. You can access things differently through this type of impressionistic snippet writing. I enjoy David Shields takes more, but both seem to be cut from a similar genre that has emerged to address this current te......more

I found myself reading this book slowly. I kept it by my stationary bike, reading 8-10 pages a day. The only problem is I couldn’t get a sustained workout in—I kept stopping to highlight passages or write notes. I’ve spent a number of years researching the literary structures of memory and invented......more