Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening has the look of a graphic novel, but it’s actually a group of interrelated philosophical essays presented in comic book form. This stunning work of art presents a gauntlet of brain-teasers that challenge our assumptions about the nature of human perception and understanding. Sousanis’s central message––that we should learn to see from […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]
“The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 485 “If you’ve heard voices in your head once, you’re never sure again if a random thought is just a random thought, or something more.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 549
“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 390
“There’s something strange about a place where men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new […]
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]
Of the many paradoxes that bedevil human nature, one of the most intriguing is our tendency to seek out freedom while simultaneously longing for submission. American philosopher Josiah Royce understood this well: We profoundly want both to rule and to be ruled. We must be each of us at the centre of his own active […]
American philosopher John Dewey defines art as “the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously…the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature” (Art as Experience, 26). In this sense, novels can be understood as records of imagined experience that harness a reader’s mental apparatus in order to […]
Joseph J. Romm’s Language Intelligence gives a brief survey of Western rhetoric, tossing classic figures like Jesus and Shakespeare together with contemporaries like George W. Bush and Lady Gaga. The book is designed to help writers “become more persuasive, more memorable, and harder to manipulate” (vii). While I think Romm achieves this to an extent, […]
“Dr. Geffard teaches her the names of shells––Lambis lambis, Cypraea moneta, Lophiotoma actua––and lets her feel the spines and apertures and whorls of each in turn. He explains the branches of marine evolution and the sequences of the geologic periods; on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of […]