TheNew York Timesbestselling author ofFind MeandCall Me by Your Namereturns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works

Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods thatindicate that certain events have not happened,may never happen, or should or must or are indeeddesired to happen, but for which there is no indicationthat they will ever happen. Irrealis moodsare also known as counterfactual moods and includethe conditional, the subjunctive, the optative,and the imperativeall best expressed in thisbook as the might-be and the might-have-been.

One of the great prose stylists of his generation, Andr Aciman returns to the essay form inHomo Irrealisto explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, ric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg,Homo Irrealisis a deep reflection on the imaginations power to forge a zone outside of times intractable hold.

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