Trickster Makes This World Mischief, Myth and Art [Paperback]

InTrickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old storiesHermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among othersand then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication,Trickster Makes This Worldauthoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its stylehas taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.

[A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal. Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

A major work of scholarship that is also a major work of art. Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University

Brilliant . . . By the time [Hyde] is done he has folded language culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken. The New Yorker

Hyde is one of our true superstars of nonfiction. David Foster Wallace

[Trickster Makes This World] should be ready by anyone interested in the grand and squalid matter of all things human. Margaret Atwood, Los Angeles Times

Lewis Hydeis the author ofThe Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of PropertyandCommon as Air(FSG, 2010). A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, he is currently Luce Professor of Art and Politics at Kenyon College.