Jennifer Michael Hecht

A leading public critic reminds us of the compelling reasons people throughout time have found to stay alive

A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

Stay

The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent roadmap to meaning and connection through poetry.

Where do we ﬁnd magic? Peace? Connection?

We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, oﬃcial archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live―in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.

So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still oﬀer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry.

In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authen-tic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht oﬀers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world―Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others―she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, our very being, and poetry itself.

Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.

Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives

The Wonder Paradox

تاريخ الشك

A cultural history of the concept of happiness challenges popular beliefs about how such goals as wealth, an ideal body, and anti-depressants have actually affected happiness levels in the past, in an account that tests popular scientific perspectives that promote dogmatic or ritualized modes of self-care. By the author of Doubt: A History.

Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

The Happiness Myth

Hecht repurposes texts and creates a magic echo chamber, bringing the lines and lyrics of long-gone friends to the table.

Who Said

On October 19, 1876, a group of leading French citizens, both men and women, joined together to form an unusual group, the Society of Mutual Autopsy, with the aim of proving that souls do not exist. This is the story of this group of atheists who createdthe science of anthropology.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

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