Breaking Bread with the Dead

A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

"W.H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD, distinguished professor and author Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the great writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present. Today we are battling too much information, a society changing at lightning speed, algorithms aimed at shaping our every move, and a sense that history is not a resource, only something to be vanquished. The modern solution to our problems is turn inwards, to surround ourselves only with that which is like us. Jacobs' answer is just the opposite: to be in conversation with, and to be challenged by, the great thinkers of the past. What can Homer teach us about force? What does Frederick Douglass have to say about our difficulties with the Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who are doing this work? How can Ursula K. Le Guin teach us to see the women of the canon differently? BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD is a close reading with a gifted scholar of texts from across the ages, including the work of Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Claude Levi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more. By agreeing to a conversation with the past, we can draw on more wisdom than the modern consciousness offers"--