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.

Praise

"[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

 

About the Author(s)

Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde is the author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Common as Air, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, he is currently Luce Professor of Art and Politics at Kenyon College.

photo: ©Larry Hamil

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Excerpt

Trickster Makes This World
PART ONETRAP OF NATURE1SLIPPING THE TRAP OF APPETITEThe whitebait Opens its black eyes In the net of the Law.--BashoTHE BAIT THIEFThe trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs.

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