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Zusatztext Praise for I Dream With Open Eyes : "George Prochnik is our great biographer of émigré writers, chronicling lost-and-found souls such as Heinrich Heine, Gershom Scholem, and Stefan Zweig as they flee from (and sometimes toward) disaster. In I Dream with Open Eyes Prochnik turns his exilic gaze on his own departure from New York City in the wake of the Trump election, an ambivalent leave-taking that has inspired this extraordinary reflection on 'home.' What is it exactly? A brownstone filled with mementoes of a family whose members range from early Puritans and friends of Emerson to Southern Confederates and associates of Freud to émigrés, like Freud, from a Vienna on the cusp of catastrophe? A Brooklyn neighborhood whose rich mix of people is threatened by a mercilessly unequal economy? A country that seems thrilled to death by nihilistic behavior of all sorts? A language that is everyday more corrupted by a bullshit artist turned President and a social media complex fueled by inflammatory takes? In the midst of this conflagration, heightened by a raging virus and a suffering environment, Prochnik seizes on almost utopian moments in which alternative ways of living and loving suddenly appear. This book offers hopeful respite in that unexpected home too." ––Hal Foster, author of What Comes after Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle Praise for In Pursuit of Silence : "A fascinating—and often funny—look at our most abused sense. Turn off your iPod and read this book." —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe "George Prochnik has gifted us with an impassioned, searching meditation on the antique virtues of silence, the evolving natural history of our most overtaxed sense, the etiology of sound in the modern world and the discrete joys of earbud-free listening. Find a quiet corner in which to read this book, but then go out into the world and be prepared to hear it anew." —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic "Elegant and eloquent." — The New York Times Praise for The Impossible Exile: "[A] superbly lyrical study . . . The Impossible Exile is not really—or not just—a biography of Zweig's final years. It is a case study of dislocation, of people who had not only lost a home but who were no longer able to define the meaning of home . . . Mr. Prochnik gives a very rich sense of what so many exiles experienced during the war . . . [his] words could not be more resonant." —Andre Aciman, The Wall Street Journal "Subtle, prodigiously researched and enduringly human throughout, The Impossible Exile is a portrait of a man and of his endless flight." — The Economist Informationen zum Autor George Prochnik Klappentext A journey of reckoning and renewal, this story of family history and future dreams is an examination of the individual imagination as a catalyst for social change Whatever the ideological slant of our information feeds, nowadays we all share a sense of binge-watching the apocalypse. Facing so much uncertainty, we need a language for thinking about the unknown not simply as a threat but also as a space of fertile possibility. George Prochnik has chosen to reflect on these urgent themes through the lens of a personal narrative: an account of his own family’s decision to leave the United States. I Dream with Open Eyes begins with an exploration of Prochnik’s ancestral past: the pilgrimage of his mother’s family, who were among the first English settlers in the New World. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a parallel migration unfolds as Prochnik, along with his wife and their son, makes the decision to uproot their lives in New York to move to England. A deep critique of this current moment, Prochnik takes the words of nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, “I drea...
