The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary writings.

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.

The e-book includes a sample chapter from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

“A dyspeptic dystopian’s mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling.”—Kirkus Reviews

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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary writings.

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.

The e-book includes a sample chapter from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

“A dyspeptic dystopian’s mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Overview

A glimpse into the mind of the bestselling science fiction author through a collection of his personal, metaphysical, religious, visionary writings.

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.

The e-book includes a sample chapter from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

“A dyspeptic dystopian’s mad secret notebooks, imposing order—at least of a kind—on a chaotic world…Fascinating and unsettling.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547549279
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1260
Sales rank:	437,894
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall,Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of several novels, including Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude;Gun, with Occasional Music; and Dissident Gardens.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

There can be no more dependable indicator that we now all inhabit (or delude ourselves into believing we inhabit) a Philip K. Dick universe (or the shoddy simulacrum thereof) than the appearance of this mammoth volume of Dick’s journals, letters, and private stream-of-consciousness essays, which he voluminously generated for a full eight years following his infamous mind-blasting, soul-shattering, paradigm-upsetting cosmic epiphany of 1974. Only waves of patented PKD-style reality distortion could have landed us in our contemporary situation.

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Much-revered sf author Dick turned metaphysical as he grew older, spending the last eight years of his life trying to understand what he called "2-3-74"—an experience of the universe transformed into information. He devoted thousands of pages of notes, journal entries, and sketches to this effort, packing some of his thoughts into his final "VALIS" trilogy. Pamela Jackson, who devoted her dissertation to "2-3-74," and novelist Jonathan Lethem have edited Dick's vast material to create this final Exegesis. A blockbuster for all fans of speculative literature.

Library Journal

In this memoir, listeners hear about sci-fi novelist Dick’s writing process as he wrestles with a tangled web of philosophical parables, theological quandaries, and his own consciousness. Narrator Fred Stella’s upbeat lilt and clarity will captivate listeners as he re-creates Dick’s enthusiasm and manic energy. This massive and dense writing project is erudite and theory laden, like a master class, and attentive listeners will want to pause often to take notes. It’s also rife with editor’s notes, which listeners are alerted to by an unobtrusive audio beep. Sci-fi scholars and PKD enthusiasts will delight in listening to these intense revelations, but casual listeners may not make it past the introduction. F.T. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2012 - AudioFile

A dyspeptic dystopian's mad secret notebooks, imposing order--at least of a kind--on a chaotic world. "The majority of these writings…are neither familiar nor wholly lucid nor, largely, elegant," write editors Lethem and Jackson. That's exactly right. But it is a measure of the esteem in which the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick is held in the literary world that Lethem and Jackson could be brought into this vast disorder--a project, in its own way, rather like the frankensteining of David Foster Wallace's Pale King, and with many of the same conditions present: a vastness of notes, a hint of a complete system (in this case, partially imposed by a previous editor) and the impossibility of that completeness without much posthumous help. And that complete system is surpassing strange. Dick writes of a critical moment in 1974, "at the initial height of the ‘Holy Other' pouring into me, when I saw the universe as it is, I saw as the active agent, a gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity from the future, arranging bits and pieces here: arranging what time drove forward." Very well, then. That entity--perhaps, the editors whisper, a manifestation of epilepsy, though perhaps not--seems to have confirmed Dick's suspicion, which lies at the heart of so much of his work, that the world we inhabit is an elaborate ruse and that any freedom we have is illusory: "We are being fed a spurious reality"; "one cannot sense that reality is somehow insubstantial unless somehow, unconsciously, one is comparing or contrasting that reality with a kind of hyper-reality; otherwise the intuition makes no sense." A blend of diary, notebook, ledger, blotter and back-of-envelope scribbles, Dick's "exegesis" of that reality ranges from sublime philosophizing ("Our sin is self-centered monocamerality") to chronicling (among other things, Richard Nixon's last days in office) to strange ranting. In short, it's in perfect keeping with his body of work at large. Fascinating and unsettling. Still, at more than 900 pages, this will test the mettle--and the stamina--of even the most devoted of Dick fans.

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