Some Trick

By Helen DeWitt

Book Overview

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world's piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. "Look," a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove "more complicated than they had first appeared" and "at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate." In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt's signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly "taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811228932
• ISBN13: 9780811228930
• Release Date: October 2019
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"