HOW TO BE WEIRD

This is the perfect guidebook for cultivating the surprising joys that come from living a weird, off-kilter life.

We crave the weird - the quirky, the eccentric, the peculiar, the freaky, the far-out - because it takes us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, nullifies old conceptual maps, and propels us into uncharted regions.

Or to put it more simply: weirdness is essential to an interesting life.

In HOW TO BE WEIRD, Eric G. Wilson offers fun and philosophically rich exercises for embracing all the weird in the world around us - taking aimless walks, creating a reverie nook, exploring the underside of bridges, making tombstone rubbings, finding your own Narnia, and more.

With brief digestible entries on how to make sense of the random, guidelines on how to defamiliarize familiar objects through meditation, and exercises for locating weird states and phenomena ourselves, HOW TO BE WEIRD is an invitation to lean into the weird and to live a fuller life.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of books Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, an LA Times bestseller; Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away; and Keep it Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, as well as many other books exploring connections among literature, film, and psychology.