Trickster Makes This World
How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture.
Lewis Hyde
“Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox… A boundary-crosser”
Available as Paperback, eBook
This book from the author of The Gift is about imagination and philosophy and was described by Margaret Atwood as a ‘masterpiece’
Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture.
Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.
“This book is a revelation”
the Times
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“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
“His big ideas are seriously good ones”
guardian
“An act of pure pleasure from first to last”
Michael Chabon
Lewis Hyde
Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to Trickster Makes This World, he is the author of The Gift, a defence of the importance of creativity in our increasingly money-orientated society. A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, Hyde is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.
