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    When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability.

    The editors—Krupnick’s wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner—have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick’s work with the “deep places” of his own imagination.

A lively exploration of the Indigenous traditions of shamanism in the Far North of Eurasia and North America.

Charles Stépanoff draws on ethnographic literature and his fieldwork in Siberia to reveal the immense contribution to the scope of human imagination made by shamans and the cognitive techniques they developed over the centuries.

Northern Shamans travel in mind in ways that appear mysterious to Westerners, but which rely on the human capacity of imagination. They perceive themselves simultaneously in two types of space—one visible, the other invisible—putting them in contact and establishing links with non-human beings in their surroundings. Shamans share their experience of mind travel with their patients, families, or the wider community, allowing them to participate in their odyssey through the invisible. Stépanoff offers an anthropological reflection on the relationships between our uses of the imagination, our relationships with the environment, and the emergence of social hierarchies.

This work will appeal to anthropologists as well as to anyone interested in learning about the power of imagination from the masters of the invisible, the shamans of the Far North.