Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture.

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.

Reviews of Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture.

This book is a revelation * The Times * His big ideas are seriously good ones * Guardian * A glorious grab-bag stuffed with necessary loot, a joyful plum pudding rich in treasures — Margaret Atwood * Los Angeles Times * An act of pure pleasure from first to last — Michael Chabon Hyde is one of our true superstars of non-fiction … Both brilliant (intellectually, literarily) and wise (psychologically, spiritually, you-name-itally) — David Foster Wallace Lewis Hyde's second masterpiece — Margaret Atwood A masterpiece … The thrilling thing about reading non-fiction such as Hyde's is not just that it gives you new thoughts: it also changes the way you think * Scotland on Sunday * 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 * Hyde is far more than an astute cultural critic; he's an original and important thinker. Pass it on — Geoff Dyer Hyde is an armchair analyst issuing a moral commentary about individuality which is urgently needed now, when American culture is so threatened by conformity and materialism — Jackie Wullschlager * Financial Times *