Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

Divine Invasions is the definitive biography of one of America's greatest novelists and science fiction's greatest ambassador to literary audiences. Philip K. Dick loosened the bonds of the genre, ultimately making his reputation as a literary writer who happened to write speculative fiction, and profoundly influencing such writers as Pynchon, Delillo, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem.

"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant.TheExegesisis the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasnand#8217;t a legend and he wasnand#8217;t mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."and#8212;Jonathan Lethem Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches,The Exegesis of Philip K. Dickis 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 Dickand#8217;s brilliant, and epic, final work. In theExegesis, 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 theExegesisand establishing connections with moments in Dickand#8217;s life and work.

Lawrence Sutin is an award-winning memoirist and biographer. His books include Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance; Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick; and the forthcoming Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. Sutin teaches in the M.F.A. program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.