Elliot Weinberger + Stephen Sparks

Praise for Eliot Weinberger:

“One remains in silent amazement: How does he find these stories? How does he know everything?” —Die Zeit

“His essays are dense collages of magical facts that make me ecstatic every time I read them.” —Sam Anderson, The New York Times

“As is often the case with brilliant writers, an Eliot Weinberger sentence cannot be mistaken for that of anyone else.” —Will Heyward, Australian Book Review

“The brilliant net of details that Weinberger casts and recasts in his various inventive approaches to form is precisely what constitutes a superlative poetic imagination. And it’s what holds the essays—and us—trembling and raging and hallucinating together.” —Forrest Gander

“Our personal favorite for the Nobel Prize.” —Rolling Stone (Germany)
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About The Ghosts of Birds:

The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into a “vortex for the entire universe” (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey down the Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, and shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. The second section collects Weinberger’s essays on a wide range of subjects some of which have been published in Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books including his notorious review of George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points and writings about Mongolian art and poetry, different versions of the Buddha, American Indophilia (There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X ), Bela Balazs, Herbert Read, and Charles Reznikoff. This collection proves once again that Weinberger is “one of the bravest and sharpest minds in the United States” (Javier Marias).