“A Primer for Forgetting is the most original and ‘slantingly’ (in Emily Dickinson’s sense) profound book I’ve read in ages.”
—David Rieff, author of In Praise of Forgetting 

 “In A Primer for Forgetting, that bold yet gentle intellectual adventurer Lewis Hyde harrows the bottomless mysteries of memory and forgetting, trauma and recovery, amnesia and commemoration, reconciliation and forgiveness. If this deep, poignant, soulful, inquisitive, gently tragic, and disarmingly erudite book were nine times longer, I still would have felt sad when I realized it was coming to an end.”
—Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

“Slavery, civil war, genocide—will the consequences of these horrors ever end? Could forgetting be a way to reconciliation? Lewis Hyde distinguishes between kinds of forgetting—one of which may lead to forgiveness and justice. In A Primer for Forgetting, he has given us yet another invaluable work that advances humanity.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace

“The sequence of Lewis Hyde’s brilliant cultural interventions here reaches a new height, but also a new level of intimacy and compassion. The book feels not so much written as ‘unforgotten’ onto the page, out of our collective desire to rescue the world.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

“Lewis Hyde stands among the pinnacle writers (Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Rachel Carson) who make visible foundational truths. This seemingly modest, entirely irresistible volume offers nothing less than a road map to sanity. It shows how fixities can be made malleable, unsustainable griefs made bearable, memory and forgetting made allies in finding a new navigation of the psyche’s and history’s precipitous terrains. A political book of indispensable insight and a liberation of lives, A Primer for Forgetting is the most important book I’ve read in years.”
—Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty

 “Wonderfully inventive . . . Hyde is very much a stylistic and political descendant of . . . the visionary poet Walt Whitman whose delirious lyric epics sought to affirm the full range of humanity from within the expansive confines of his selfhood, and whose essays forged an intricate link between democracy and imagination. Clarity and accessibility are in this sense more than creditable qualities of Hyde’s prose; they express a distinctly American vision of a cultural commons whose riches are available to all who wish to enjoy them. And nowhere is this Americanness more evident than in Hyde’s qualified defense of forgetting.”
—Joshua Cohen, The Guardian (PDF)  

“Hyde remains as sprightly and contrarian as ever, and in fact [A Primer] is freer from argument than his previous books. He has done away with topic sentences, and his ruminations unfold in a series of small, evocative parables . . . Hyde tells story after parabolic story about people involved in deep, long contentions with the afterlife of cruelty who are finally able set these memories down and continue on into their own—perhaps more lighthearted—futures.”
—Mona Simpson, Book Post

 “Fascinating . . . a meditation on forgiveness . . . how to work toward a harmonious coexistence with others, especially how, amicably, to cross the divide of political difference. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but it is also, I think, imminent necessity.”
—Lydia Davis, The Paris Review (Favorite Books of 2019)

“Roaming from ancient myth to contemporary truth-and-reconciliation efforts, this unusual study dwells on ‘cases in which letting go of the past proves to be at least as useful as preserving it’ . .  . Forgetting is inextricably tied to endings, to forgiveness, and to death, and the book is at times wrenching: victors obscure inhuman massacres; Hyde’s elderly mother has forgotten his name.”
—The New Yorker (Briefly Noted)

“Doesn’t the quest for justice insist on remembrance? It is to Hyde’s great credit that he dwells on cases that demand recollection to shake off the chains of past horrors. He remembers the young African American men, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, who in 1964 were brutally tortured by Klansmen before being drowned in the Mississippi River . . . Hyde is fascinated by Thomas Moore, brother of the murdered Charles, who . . . achieved the freedom that comes with some forgetting and was nourished by the peace that forgiveness brings.”
—Michael S. Roth, The Washington Post (PDF)  

“You know what Lewis Hyde is like: puckish, playful, a performer . . . writing about creativity that combined an interest in the arcane with an understanding of global cultures and a commonsense approach to artistic practice.”
—Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement (PDF)  

“Mr. Hyde’s real subject is ‘the now that remains.’ Early in this wondrous book he quotes a letter from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who is writing partly in praise of the attentive oblivion necessary for any great creative accomplishment (she is reading Charles Darwin) and partly in praise of the Oblivion that the right attention enables: “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” That would be an apt description of this entire book. I can’t tell you how many times I put it down to stare out the window. I can think of no higher praise.”
—Christian Wiman, The Wall Street Journal (PDF)  

“Lewis Hyde’s idiosyncratic and brilliant new book . . . subverts our tendency to associate memory with discipline and intelligence, forgetfulness with distraction and infirmity. Looking at forgetfulness through multiple lenses — myth, psychology, politics, and aesthetics — Hyde instead sets out to ‘test the proposition that forgetfulness can be more useful than memory or, at the very least, that memory functions best in tandem with forgetting’ . . . . Hyde makes us forget what we thought we knew about forgetfulness—and, in doing so, he makes us know forgetfulness for the first time.”
—Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe (PDF)  

“You should buy it and read it as soon as you’ve got a chance. Hyde’s one of the few authors I know of whose work, even if you disagree with it, leaves your mind almost thrummingly alive . . . Hyde will shake how you think of things, but of course there’s a price. He is one of the best writers we’ve got going, if only for how seriously he takes his readers’ intelligence, how little he’s trying to pander. There’s no clear answer to how to get past the past, what details or abstractions to remember or let go of, and Hyde is not claiming there is. But if we ever — as individuals or a society — are going to find a way forward, I’m betting that Hyde’ll have something to do with it.”
—Weston Cutter, Minneapolis  Star Tribute (PDF)  

“Poet-essayist Hyde celebrates forgetting as a force for creative potency, personal growth, and social justice, and in doing so reminds us of his talent for intellectual synthesis and his restless, contrarian spirit . . . Hyde’s thesis . . . transcends simple polemic. Rather, in the way of Zen Buddhism, it’s an invitation to forget our very selves so that we might finally see the universe clearly. And alongside all of the bright-burning erudition, there is a very moving personal angle: his mother’s progressive dementia and the prospect of his own.”
—Brendan Driscoll, Booklist

“Amnesia, nostalgia, forgiveness, retribution, and the mining of memory in psychoanalysis—Hyde considers all these and more. An eclectic and insightful miscellany of playful, spirited, provocative reflections.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“In this delicate, allusive thought experiment, literary critic Hyde (The Gift) probes the idea of forgetting as a positive act . . . Venturing outside Western culture, he also finds a luminous truth in the Buddhist notion that real awakening comes when one forgets everything but the present moment. An elegant exercise in philosophy and form, Hyde’s meditation on forgetting as an act of clarity offers stimulating contemplation of the odd paradox that ‘memory and oblivion . . . cannot function unless they work together.’”
—Publishers Weekly 

“A beautiful book that leaves most of the work to you. But that work doesn’t feel like work, it’s not a puzzle to be solved . . . The book creates clearings that allow you to comfortably contemplate what everyone’s afraid of: blankness. In this sense, Primer invites what most books hope to stave off: oblivion.”
—Michael Mungiello, Full Stop

 “A Primer for Forgetting should be read as a work of art, reminding us that artists must forgo previous forms and boundaries in order to produce something new. To create, they must forget. Hyde has not merely explained the benefits of forgetting. In his Primer, Hyde has shown them.”
—Charles Halton, Bearings Online

“Erudite . . . Hyde roams freely in this book as he tracks down devotees of memory and those who would much rather forget. Both have left their marks and legacies upon history. We are beholden to this author for focusing our attention on their actions, thoughts, words, and deeds.”
—Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Practice

“Crystalline, penetrating, and multifaceted, these collected musings by Lewis Hyde plumb one of life’s most formidable conundrums: what needs remembering, and what not.”
—Lawrence Weschler, author of And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

“In this unforgettable rumination on the power of forgetting, Lewis Hyde offers us the gift of his most intimate reflections. Weaving vengeance, violence, regret, memory, prejudice, identity, forgiveness and transcendence into one entrancing whole, he points the way toward both outer and inner peace.”
―Mark Epstein, author of The Trauma of Everyday Life and Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“A Primer for Forgetting is a brilliant, original, and provocative work that free associates like an intelligent and ultimately rational dream.”
―Dale Peterson, author of Jane Goodall:  the Woman Who Redefined Man 

“Having surrendered densely layered argument for ‘prose collage,’ Hyde admits failure twice, in the post–Civil War narrative, and in the displacement and genocide of the indigenous peoples of this country. We shouldn’t forget these — at least not yet. We still need to care.”
—Sebastian Stockman, Los Angles Review of Books (PDF)  

“A Primer for Forgetting is a lightning bolt of a book, a luminous meditation on the uses and disadvantages of memory. Hyde has distilled a lifetime of learning across disciplines into a vital and vivifying collection of parables,  anecdotes, and gnomic insights that ramify the mind, that urge us to ask better questions of ourselves, to honor the responsibilities we have to one another, and to the wrestle with the debt we owe history. Hyde has given us a rare gift, and again proven himself master of what can only be called wisdom literature.” 
—Cheston Knapp, author of Up Up, Down Down

“A Primer for Forgetting . . . is essential reading for a nuanced understanding of how the complex of memory-and-oblivion might work together to create a more nimble world in our political present.” —Ann Hamilton, artist