Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art - Paperback

by Lewis Hyde (Author), Michael Chabon (Foreword by)

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.

Author Biography

Lewis Hyde is the author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Common as Air (FSG, 2010). A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, he is currently Luce Professor of Art and Politics at Kenyon College.