Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

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.

This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.

Trickster Makes This World solidifies Lewis Hyde's reputation as, in Robert Bly's words, "the most subtle, thorough, and brilliant mythologist we now have." In it, Hyde now brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first revisits 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 life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style, Trickster Makes This World ranks among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

Michael Dirda

Persuasively celebrates the need for the kind of paintings, music, books and ideas that society initially finds unpleasant. . . [A] hymn to the gods of mischief, who are also the gods of artistic and cultural renewal. -- Washington Post Book World

Lewis Hyde is the author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, he is currently Luce Professor of Art and Politics at Kenyon College and lives with his wife in Gambier, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.