Please join Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the publication of High Weirdness by Erik Davis.
DOORS: 7.30PM
Admission £5 (deductible from a copy of the book)
Featuring a presentation by Erik Davis,
Followed by Erik Davis, Daisy Campbell and Roger Luckhurst in conversation.
The first book in a very long time that’s given me the feeling of discovering a secret truth.
— Douglas Rushkoff
Even if I was tripping I couldn’t imagine a better guide to the outer limits than Erik Davis.
– McKenzie Wark
Straddles high scholarship and hipness… an important milestone in esoteric studies.
– Victoria Nelson
A study of the spiritual provocations found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview out of the American counterculture of the seventies. These three visionaries changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their own writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America during one of its most surreal eras?
In High Weirdness, Erik Davis examines the writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own extraordinary, life-changing experiences. Along the way, Davis maps the uncanny lattice of culture and consciousness that characterized America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social change. What results is a new theory of the weird that illuminates the seventies, while providing for a renewed engagement with reality during our own highly weird times.
Erik Davis is the author of High Weirdness, Techgnosis, Nomad Codes and others. He is considered America’s leading scholar of the strange.
Daisy Eris Campbell is a writer actor and theatre director. She recently adapted Robert Anton Wilson’s 'Cosmic Trigger’ for the stage
Roger Luckhurst is the author of Corridors: Passages of Modernity (2019) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London.