Karmic Traces - Softcover

Weinberger, Eliot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214567 ISBN 13: 9780811214568

Publisher: New Directions, 2000

Synopsis

For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing. In Karmic Traces, his third collection with New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author’s personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the hand-over to China, as well as on imagined voyages on a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And in “The Falls,” the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncovering the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.

About this title

About the Author:

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.

Review:

A beautiful little volume of essays. -- The Westerly, Jane Johnson, 21 February 2005

A vortex for the entire universe. -- The Boston Review, John Palatella, December 2000

It is a pleasure just to wander about in Weinberger's style. -- Marilis Hornidge, Waldoboro Courier-Gazette, 20 March 2001

This far-ranging collection is both thoughtful and...always entertaining. -- The Complete Review, Winter 2001

Weinberger is a rare treat: Montaigne, who invented the essai would love him. -- Commonweal, Marguerite Feitlowitz, 15 June 2001

[A]n intellectual travelogue of surpassing wit and brilliance, ranging from Iceland to India, and pet rabbits to naked mole rats. -- Talk, December 2000

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0811214567
• ISBN 13: 9780811214568
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192