Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination

What is it to be at the edge of the world of the imagination? How do writers, readers, and thinkers deal with this threshold? How do painters represent it? This unusual book¿a combination of personal essay, literary criticism, art history, and memoir¿examines what happens when we come under the spell of writing, when we get to that place where we enter into an altered state of consciousness, either as writer or as reader. Mazur uses the idea of hinges to explore what happens at real doorways as well as at metaphysical turning points and transformations¿in fiction and poetry, and also in ordinary life. As she ranges from the ancient narratives of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Parmenides, and Orpheus, to the modern fictions of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty, she presents the hero¿s exploration of the Other World as a metaphor for how we enter into the entrancement of the novel. Along the way, she ponders such questions as: Why are the gates of Hell so noisy? Why is falling in love like a trapdoor? Why is the rotation of the earth uncanny? What happens when looking is forbidden? Mazur shows us new ways of thinking about mind, writing, and existence.

Grace Dane Mazur is the author of the novel Trespass and of a collection of stories, Silk, which was a New York Times notable book of the year. Before becoming a writer, she was a postdoctoral research biologist at Harvard University studying the microarchitecture of silkworms. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and lives in Cambridge and Westport, Massachusetts, with her husband, the mathematician Barry Mazur.