Exciting book news: 'High Weirdness'

Erik Davis, speaking at RAW Day 2017. Watch the video of his talk. 

Here's a book many of  you will want to read when it comes out next year: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies by Erik Davis.

From the MIT Press summary:

"An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.

"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?

"In High Weirdness, Erik Davis — America's leading scholar of high strangeness — examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality."

Seeing Erik Davis' name on the book only makes the announcement ever more exciting, of course. He was one of the speakers at RAW Day last year in California.  Some of you probably listen to his Expanding Mind podcast.

The MIT Press bio: "Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica."

More details from MIT Press:

Hardcover
$34.95 T
ISBN: 9781907222764
500 pp. | 6 in x 9 in
10 b&w illus.
June 2019

Hat tip: Jesse Walker.