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9781961884434

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Reviews

Praise for James Elkins' WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS ""Weak in Comparison to Dreams offers a profusion of visual and philosophical imagination... A deeply unconventional debut, it's an invitation into a teeming imagination. He has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence...If Elkins weren’t such a prolific and visible figure in the field of art history, one might read this novel, see these charts and imagine him a monomaniac in a cellar. As it is, he has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence, partly borrowed from its dreams and partly from its hypnotic interest in humans and other animals."" —John Williams, Washington Post “Weak in Comparison to Dreams is an experimental feast, an illuminated palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and ask you, just how do you think you read?” —Maria Fusco, author of History of the Present ""Weak in Comparison to Dreams is a novel that will haunt its readers even as it enchants. An astonishing book; mesmerizing, dreamlike, phantastic, grimly real. James Elkins has written a book of shimmering depth. His remarkable, expansive, and materializing imagination at once produces a toppling sense of vertigo and a deep pleasure that so many connections, carelessly unseen, exist all around us. Never before have I felt such empathy for a diagram, nor could I have anticipated such fascination with the compelling descriptions (and depictions) of musical compositions about pain and suffering."" —Pippa Skotnes, author of Lamb of God and The Book of Iterations ""Erudite and immensely entertaining, Weak in Comparison to Dreams takes the novel where it has never gone before. James Elkins probes what it means to be human. He has written a powerful, sometimes angry, and, yes, wise book. I was hooked from the first page."" —Terry Pitts, Vertigo ""Every now and again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we see literature. James Elkins’s Weak in Comparison to Dreams… surprises as much as it intrigues."" —Kimberly Brooks, artist and author of The New Oil Painting ""Experimental in the best sense of the word…"" —Eva Schuermann, author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight

Author Information

James Elkins was Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an art historian and critic as well as a recognized authority on the experimental use of images in works by W.H. Sebald and Anne Carson to Claudia Rankine and Teju Cole. Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York and for the last twenty years he has lived, studied, and taught in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books on fine art and photography which focus on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is his first novel.

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