Homo Irrealis

TheNew York Times–bestselling author ofFind MeandCall Me by Your Namereturns 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 inHomo 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, Ã?ric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg,Homo Irrealisis a deep reflection of the imagination’s power to shape our memories under time’s seemingly intractable hold.