Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde

Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde

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.

The Gift: Imagination and the Sexual Life of Property, This Error Is the Sign of Love, and Trickster Creates This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (FSG, 1998) are among Lewis Hyde's works. Hyde, a MacArthur Fellow and former director of Harvard University's undergraduate creative writing program, lectures at Kenyon College during the fall semesters. Thomas is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the rest of the year, where he works as a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.