Trickster Makes This World

In Trickster 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 stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and 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 World—authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style—has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism. This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.

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.

We live in a culture that prizes memory – how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain 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, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness? A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography and social criticism. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a philosophical and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous ‘ I Have a Dream’ speech. Thirty years later his son registered the words ‘ I Have a Dream’ as a trademark and successfully blocked attempts to reproduce these four words. Unlike the Gettysburg Address and other famous speeches, ‘ I Have a Dream’ is now private property, even though some the speech is comprised of words written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who very much believed that the corporate land grab of knowledge was at odds with the development of civil society. Exploring the complex intersection between creativity and commerce, Hyde raises the question of how our shared store of art and knowledge might be made compatible with our desire to copyright everything, and questions whether the fruits of creative labour can – or should – be privately owned, especially in the digital age. ‘ In what sense,’ he writes, ‘ can someone own, and therefore control other people’ s access to, a work of fiction or a public speech or the ideas behind a drug?’ Moving deftly between literary analysis, history and biography (from Benjamin Franklin’ s reluctance to patent his inventions to Bob Dylan’ s admission that his early method of songwriting was largely comprised of ‘ rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there… slapping a title on it’ ), Common As Air is a stirring call-to-arms about how we might concretely legislate for a cultural commons that would simultaneously allow for financial reward and protection from monopoly. Rigorous, informative and riveting, this is a book for anyone who is interested in the creative process.

By the New York Times–bestselling author of Moonglow: “When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing” (USA Today). Cherished by readers and critics alike for such extraordinary novels as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon is at the height of his considerable powers in this striking and bittersweet collection of short stories. An anxious young misfit does nothing to protect his best friend from the scorn of their teachers and classmates. A kleptomaniac real estate agent leads an unhappy couple on a disastrous house tour. A heartbroken grifter finds his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother to be an easy mark—and an unexpected source of redemption. Throughout these stories, Chabon’s characters, suffused with yearning but crippled by broken love, often find themselves at a crossroads—and faced with sudden insight. Michael Chabon is “Updike without the condescension,” wrote James Hynes in the Washington Post Book World, “Cheever without the self-pity, a young American Nabokov who writes with a rueful joie de vivre.” In this darkly funny, achingly delicate collection, he renders the compromises of adulthood and the vivid fantasies of childhood with clarity and warmth. This ebook features a biography of the author.

The trickster and the hero, found in so many of the world’s oral traditions, are seemingly opposed but often united in one character. Trickster and Hero provides a comparative look at a rich array of world oral traditions, folktales, mythologies, and literatures—from The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf to Native American and African tales. Award-winning folklorist Harold Scheub explores the “Trickster moment,” the moment in the story when the tale, the teller, and the listener are transformed: we are both man and woman, god and human, hero and villain. Scheub delves into the importance of trickster mythologies and the shifting relationships between tricksters and heroes. He examines protagonists that figure centrally in a wide range of oral narrative traditions, showing that the true hero is always to some extent a trickster as well. The trickster and hero, Scheub contends, are at the core of storytelling, and all the possibilities of life are there: we are taken apart and rebuilt, dismembered and reborn, defeated and renewed.

Following the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted Son of a Trickster comes Trickster Drift, the second book in Eden Robinson's captivating Trickster trilogy. In an effort to keep all forms of magic at bay, Jared, 17, has quit drugs and drinking. But his troubles are not over: now he's being stalked by David, his mom's ex--a preppy, khaki-wearing psycho with a proclivity for rib-breaking. And his mother, Maggie, a living, breathing badass as well as a witch, can't protect him like she used to because he's moved away from Kitimat to Vancouver for school. Even though he's got a year of sobriety under his belt (no thanks to his enabling, ever-partying mom), Jared also struggles with the temptation of drinking. And he's got to get his grades up, find a job that doesn't involve weed cookies, and somehow live peacefully with his Aunt Mave, who has been estranged from the family ever since she tried to "rescue" him as a baby from his mother. An indigenous activist and writer, Mave smothers him with pet names and hugs, but she is blind to the real dangers that lurk around them--the spirits and supernatural activity that fill her apartment. As the son of a Trickster, Jared is a magnet for magic, whether he hates it or not--he sees ghosts, he sees the monster moving underneath his Aunt Georgina's skin, he sees the creature that comes out of his bedroom wall and creepily wants to suck his toes. He also still hears the Trickster in his head, and other voices too. When the David situation becomes a crisis, Jared can't ignore his true nature any longer.