Peter Sacks · A Literary Exhibition
The Project
How the characters discover the world
Sooner or Later,
Their Feet Can’t Touch the Bottom
My novels begin inside private lives, but they do not stay private. My characters keep moving until the world reveals itself through them. When they are free to become fully themselves, they show us the world we had not yet learned how to see.
Read the essay →The connections between the novels
The struggle beneath the work
03The Civilizational Struggle Between Fear and Fearlessness
What I see now is that all four novels circle the same tension: the tension between fear and fearlessness.
Read the essay →What the novel can do
The Novel Was Built to Contain the World
Power hides in the cracks of human longing.
Read the essay →The Case for The Civilizational Novel
That’s what made the novel matter: its ability to see a civilization from the inside out.
Read the essay →I Write Novels That Are Not Supposed to Exist
Each novel is a refusal to comply with a dominant narrative.
Read the essay →
The writer behind the exhibition
Call Me Ishmael If You Want
I live alone in a trailer and write large novels about civilization, imagination, and the power of an ancient redwood tree. That's a strange sentence to write about yourself, but that's where I am in life.
Read the personal essay →