Book description
Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal
entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is
the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated
his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the
malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human
and the divine.
Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will
be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final
work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom
what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of
the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries
that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way
into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination
and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory
after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they
occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the
VALIS trilogy.
In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the
reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in
Dick's life and work. Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago
but lived in California for most of his life. He went to college at
Berkeley for a year, ran a record store and had his own classical-music
show on a local radio station. He published his first short story,
'Beyond Lies the Wub' in 1952. Among his many fine novels are THE MAN IN
THE HIGH CASTLE, TIME OUT OF JOINT, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
and FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID.
