A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

We live in a culture that prizes memory – how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document 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 and a balm?A Primer for Forgetting forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern. Combining scholarship, autobiography and social criticism, this is a unique and remarkable synthesis.

Reviews of A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

An absorbing exploration of memory, creative freedom and the importance of forgetting . . . wonderfully inventive . . . intriguing and original * * Guardian * * In A Primer for Forgetting, that bold yet gentle intellectual adventurer, Lewis Hyde, harrows the bottomless mysteries of memory and forgetting, trauma and recovery, amnesia and commemoration, reconciliation and forgiveness. If this deep, poignant, soulful, inquisitive, gently tragic and disarmingly erudite book were nine times longer, I would still have felt sad when I realized it was coming to an end — MICHAEL CHABON The sequence of Lewis Hyde's brilliant cultural interventions here reaches a new height, but also a new level of intimacy and compassion. The book feels not so much written as "unforgotten" onto the page, out of our collective desire to rescue the world — JONATHAN LETHEM Lewis Hyde's new book is so counterintuitive, so bracingly clear and fresh, that reading it is like leaping into a cold lake on a hot hike. It shocks the mind. It flushes all kinds of monotony and mental fatigue right out of your system * * Wall Street Journal * * Praise for Trickster Makes This World: This book is a revelation * * The Times * * A modern classic . . . which celebrates the power of disruptive imagination * * 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 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 * *