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Homo Irrealis

By: André Aciman
Narrated by: André Aciman, Edoardo Ballerini
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Publisher's summary

2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

The New York Times best-selling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works.

Irrealis moods are the set of verbal moods that indicate that something is not actually the case or a certain situation or action is not known to have happened....

André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was - but could in theory still happen.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination’s power to shape our memories under time’s seemingly intractable hold.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2021 André Aciman (P)2021 Macmillan Audio
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Critic reviews

PEN Literary Award - Finalist, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2021

What listeners say about Homo Irrealis

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True Aciman

Adore this book gets to the heart speaks through the ages of longing for all of us displaced

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Banal

I didn't finish, but started at least each chapter. Self-absorbed, superficial musings. This is not an inspirational, life-affirming journey.

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