I Dream with Open Eyes

"An erudite examination of heritage, home, the meaning of [Prochnik's] life’s work, and his place in the world . . . From Titian to the surrealists, Stefan Zweig to Walter Benjamin, H.D. to Elizabeth Bishop, Prochnik draws on art, philosophy, literature, and heavily on Freud as he contemplates his “longing to move to a different moment in history” and to change his life—and his son’s—“instead of just being forced to submit to the ways the world was changing so alarmingly around us. A dark, brooding, and highly literate meditation." 

—Kirkus Reviews

"George Prochnik is our great biographer of émigré writers, chronicling lost-and-found souls such as Heinrich Heine, Gershom Scholem, and Stefan Zweig as they flee from (and sometimes toward) disaster. In I Dream with Open Eyes Prochnik turns his exilic gaze on his own departure from New York City in the wake of the Trump election, an ambivalent leave-taking that has inspired this extraordinary reflection on “home”. What is it exactly? A brownstone filled with mementoes of a family whose members range from early Puritans and friends of Emerson to Southern Confederates and associates of Freud to émigrés, like Freud, from a Vienna on the cusp of catastrophe? A Brooklyn neighborhood whose rich mix of people is threatened by a mercilessly unequal economy? A country that seems thrilled to death by nihilistic behavior of all sorts? A language that is everyday more corrupted by a bullshit artist turned President and a social media complex fueled by inflammatory takes? In the midst of this conflagration, heightened by a raging virus and a suffering environment, Prochnik seizes on almost utopian moments in which alternative ways of living and loving suddenly appear. This book offers hopeful respite in that unexpected home too." 

—Hal Foster, author of What Comes after Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle 

"In this thrillingly candid book, Prochnik examines his decision to leave his home - the United States – and addresses questions that are becoming all too familiar and all too pressing for more and more of us: How do we proceed, how do we think, how do we understand ourselves and even our existence on Earth when social and political convulsions shatter our sense of belonging to something – to a nation or culture? Prochnik delights us with his transporting eloquence, kindness, and erudition, the originality of his thought, and astonishing reflections on his family and background. The book shines, and in the darkness where we live now, it leaves us with an orienting and invigorated sense of possibilities."

—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck