Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture. - Tapa dura

With The Gift, an extraordinary book that became one of the publishing highlights of 2006, Lewis Hyde gave us...a masterpiece in its own right...In many ways, Trickster Makes This World is a continuation of this work...[a] wonderful, inspiring book... this marvellous book seems to me either the herald of a new dawn or a last-ditch warning of the disaster to come, should we fail to renew the pact with the Trickster. -- John Burnside * * Scotsman * * [A] masterly meditation... This book is a revelation, a scholarly and deeply imagined meditation on cultural and spiritual transformation. -- Hugh Lupton * * The Times * * His big ideas are seriously good ones. Both of his earnest but hopeful books are well worth diving into...Hyde's own bravura raids on literacy, as on the world's great oral traditions, pay off here in a genuinely original way. -- David Lan * * Guardian * * [a] marvellous, sprawling and sometimes baffling exploration of the trickster's role in the story of mankind...Hyde can soar and illuminate...There is a brilliance to his arguments. He shines light on the subjects central to mankind by using a series of techniques that have a challenging intellect at their core. -- Hugh Macdonald * * Herald * * Hyde is one of our true superstars of non fiction - this book not only covers its subject in more depth and comprehension than anything before (anything I've read, anyway) but it also ends up being about ...well, everything. The guy's both brilliant (intellectually, literarily) and wise (psychologically, spiritually, you-name-itally). -- David Foster Wallace [Hyde] is one of those quirky, eccentric Wise Children the United States sometimes throws up-a sort of Thoreau-cum-anthropologist-cum-seer...[Trickster] should be read by anyone interested in the grand and squalid matter of all things human...A glorious grab-bag stuffed with necessary loot, a joyful plum pudding rich in treasures. -- Margaret Atwood * * Los Angeles Times * * Brilliant...By the time he is done he has folded language, culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken. * * The New Yorker * * If it is the measure of a good book that it prompts more thoughts even than it contains, then Trickster is a very good book indeed. -- Brian Morton * * Sunday Herald * *

Trickster Makes This World brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls subverting defence systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating and stealing, trickster are a great bother to have around but paradoxically they are also indispensable heroes. In this fascinating book, Lewis Hyde explores the old myths that state that the trickster made the world as it actually is. He argues that our world, with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished.