"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is an experimental feast, an illuminated palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and ask you, just how do you think you read?" -Maria Fusco, author of History of the Present

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is a novel that will haunt its readers even as it enchants. An astonishing book; mesmerizing, dreamlike, phantastic, grimly real. James Elkins has written a book of shimmering depth. His remarkable, expansive, and materializing imagination at once produces a toppling sense of vertigo and a deep pleasure that so many connections, carelessly unseen, exist all around us. Never before have I felt such empathy for a diagram, nor could I have anticipated such fascination with the compelling descriptions (and depictions) of musical compositions about pain and suffering." -Pippa Skotnes, author of Lamb of God and the Book of Iterations

"Erudite and immensely entertaining, Weak in Comparison to Dreams takes the novel where it has never gone before. James Elkins probes what it means to be human. He has written a powerful, sometimes angry, and, yes, wise book. I was hooked from the first page." -Terry Pitts, Vertigo

"Every now and again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we see literature. James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams... surprises as much as it intrigues." -Kimberly Brooks, artist and author of The New Oil Painting

"Experimental in the best sense of the word..." -Eva Schuermann, author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight

"Reveries, dreams, reflections and memories drive this Sebald-inspired narrative through combinations of word and image... Elkins's novel offers a profoundly provocative exercise in visual thinking." -Hanneke Grootenboer, author of The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking

"Elegantly written and imaginatively intricate as well as subtle in its capacity to induce readers to become involved in the details of a solitary consciousness." -Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams offers a profusion of visual and philosophical imagination... A deeply unconventional debut, it's an invitation into a teeming imagination. He has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence..." -John Williams, Washington Post

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unlike any book I have ever read: a fascinating mixture of introspective realism and dreamlike surrealism, of text and image.... Elkins has created a highly original, unique literary work." -Wojciech Drag, author of Collage Literature in the Twenty-First Century

"An extraordinary arthroscopic view into a man whose life is liquefying, becoming a chrysalis. Deftly drawing on the sciences and the world of visual representation, it is a story full of wit, tragedy and surprise..." -Kate Joyce, author of Metaphysics

"A fascinating journey... an endless literary feast." -Miguel Ángel Hernáaacute;ndez, author of Escape Attempt and Anoxia

"The long life of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic and first-time novelist James Elkins an epic canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in twitchy, often hilarious prose. But all you need to know is that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls." -James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street

Publisher: Unnamed Press

Pub date: 2023-12-05

Length: 607 pages