Side Effects - Softcover

Phillips, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141012501 ISBN 13: 9780141012506

Publisher: Penguin, 2007

Synopsis

penguin pbk,2006

About this title

Review:

The best living essayist writing in English

He's brilliant

Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored (Observer)

Though Phillips's territory is complication, he reports back from his travels in the simplest of words. He is perhaps single-handedly continuing the tradition of the world's best essayists

Phillips radiates infectious charm (Sunday Times)

Phillipsian' would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find you were holding it by the tail. (Guardian)

Synopsis:

Side effects are things we do not intend. And, in this collection of essays, Adam Phillips examines how the things we don't mean, or mean perhaps to forget, prove to be those that are often most telling about our unconscious lives. Phillips also intends for us to question our conscious pursuit of happiness, explaining that, in refusing to admit and explore life's down sides, we can only be living half lives. And through his unique and incisive exploration of literature, Phillips also demonstrates what the great novelists have to tell us about ourselves. Both illuminating and fascinating on literature as well as life, "Side Effects" maps our edges as human beings, and, in doing so, goes some way to helping give shape to our lives.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0141012501
• ISBN 13: 9780141012506
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336