This Wide Terraqueous World


 Contents
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Contents
 Tiger [Tiger] Tiger
 UN Story
 Giraffe Story
 Half Moon (a provisional fiction)
 Climb the Whale
 This Wide Terraqueous World
 God Bless Johnny Cash
 Still Life with Snow and Hammer
 Notes
 Funder Acknowledgments
 The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
 About the Author
 Back Cover
 
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Contents
 Tiger [Tiger] Tiger
 Acknowledgments
 Start to Contents
 
 
 
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 Cover Page
 
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 Praise for This Wide Terraqueous World
 
 
 
 “The pilgrim moves through his days and sees far. Often a genial and informative guide, always in the midst of departure, he inhabits two worlds—possessing a self who resides in dazzling light, and another shadow self, drawn to the subterranean, who lives by his side. Hunt has written a mesmerizing, entrancing chronicle of the one who exists above the ground, and the one who is inexorably drawn to the world far below, where the Radium Girls still burn, where Ella Cruse lays crackling, where in Sicily’s catacombs, riotous, celebratory, the dead in crepe and velvet beckon. In the midst of life and thinking and storytelling, ‘thinking and dreaming gone to ruin.’ A mysterious, often thrilling collection, beautifully done.”
 —Carole Maso
 
 
 “Laird Hunt’s This Wide Terraqueous World is a luminous gem of a book. Brimming with unexpected insights at every turn—whether visiting W. G. Sebald’s grave or Willa Cather’s Red Cloud or observing donkeys at a distance in China, Corsica, California—here is an account of a writer’s life in which verifiable truths and an unfettered imagination work together brilliantly. Acting as a kind of post-postmodern Virgil, Hunt takes us on a journey in which travelogue melds with philosophy, literary acumen informs cultural observation, and far-ranging memories are set free by an unusually prodigious curiosity about every large and little thing. A kaleidoscope of genre-defying essays that leaves the reader frankly awestruck, This Wide Terraqueous World is a book to celebrate and treasure.”
 —Bradford Morrow
 
 
 “Heads or Tails? An ancient game of chance. And what of the middle, the space between the head and tail? If it is, it is in the flip; it is in the moment of the coin glinting in its unfixed oscillation amidst this radiant uncertainty. It is here that I locate Laird Hunt’s visionary prose. Between the uncanny crisp edge of the detail and the blurred seam where a scene once collected, between remembering and forgetting, between the self and the act of writing, between the painted tiles that decorated the childhood nursery and those that now punctuate the scene of language’s attempts, there is something, but 
 
 
 Praise for 
 ALSO BY LAIRD HUNT