Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of the collection Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems, which was a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and n+1, among other publications, and he was named a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. He has a degree in the history of science from Harvard, where he was a member of The Harvard Lampoon, and currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
"A delightful perversion of history." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street
Journal "Somewhere at the intersection of sober science, historical
pastiche and lunatic parable . . . [The Organs of Sense] is
brilliant, weird, and profound, telling truths about the modern
condition that most novelists today have forgotten, or never knew."
--Adam Kirsch, Tablet "I've decided instead to come right out and
say of The Organs of Sense, the debut novel by Adam Erlich Sachs:
it's extremely--perhaps even deafeningly--good. Further still, I'd
call it one of the best books published in 2019." --Nathan Knapp,
Music and Literature "In his sublime first novel . . . which
recalls the nested monologues of Thomas Bernhard and the cerebral
farces of Donald Antrim, [Adam Ehrlich] Sachs demonstrates the
difficulty of getting inside other people's heads (literally and
figuratively) and out of one's own . . . How it all comes together
gives the book the feel of an intellectual thriller. Sachs's talent
is on full display in this brilliant work of visionary absurdism."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Sachs confidently
fictionalizes history, infusing the process of scientific discovery
with dark absurdity." --The New Yorker "The Organs of Sense embeds
the voices of its storytellers to create a universe of thought that
seems at once bounded and infinite, composed of many alien points
of view... It can simultaneously peer out, through the eye of the
telescope, at the splendor of the heavens, and gaze in, at the
refractions of its own manic thinking . . . by telling us the story
of the blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense shows how the
rationalist project may have been spurred by the blindest and most
irrational impulse: love." --Merve Emre, The New York Review of
Books "This impressive debut is for fans of George Saunders and
Vladimir Nabokov . . . [it is] filled with delightful tales of
palace intrigue, sibling rivalry, and extensive forays into
empirical thought and logic. Deep philosophy is applied to nearly
everything that pops up, including the eating of soup." --Library
Journal (starred review) "Beguiling and utterly magical . . . a
riveting story about geopolitical scheming, warfare, and the reach
of the Catholic League in the seventeenth century. At the novel's
beating heart, though, is a much more universal theme as Sachs
considers father-son relationships and other complicated family
dynamics that can make or break creative ambitions of all stripes .
. . Sprinkled with generous doses of philosophy, this gem of a
novel, with a spectacular denouement, might make for labored
reading initially, but ultimately, it's an utterly immersive and
transportive work of art." --Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred
review) "Adam Ehrlich Sachs's The Organs of Sense is layers-deep.
At its core it's a story of a 1666 encounter between a young
Gottfried Leibniz and a blind astronomer who makes the unlikely
prediction of a solar eclipse . . . It is at once a pitch-perfect
send-up of an overwrought philosophical tract and a philosophical
tract in its own right--meaty, hilarious, and a brilliant
examination of intangible and utterly human mysteries." --Arianna
Rebolini, BuzzFeed News
"This tale of wit and science . . . is a crazy quilt of alchemical
fable, family drama and shaggy dog saga . . . [Sachs] has
martini-dry wit and a fantastic sense of comic timing . . . In a
literary landscape crying out for wit and intricacy . . . [The
Organs of Sense is] highly recommended." --Leigh Anne Focareta,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "A madcap, ingenious fable that booms with
endless jokes and riffs about the nature of consciousness, The
Organs of Sense is yet another dazzling, high-wire performance from
our modern-day Kleist, Adam Ehrlich Sachs." --Karan Mahajan, author
of The Association of Small Bombs
"Mix Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, add dashes of Liu Cixin and
Isaac Asimov, and you'll approach this lively novel of early
science . . . impeccably written." --Kirkus Reviews "At once
erudite and comic, The Organs of Sense is an absurd and beautifully
finessed pseudo-historical novel which deftly circles around a dark
core." --Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the
World and A Collapse of Horses
"This is the funniest and most original novel I've read in a very
long time, a madcap blend of philosophical malpractice and
byzantine palace intrigue. It's like what might happen if Helen
DeWitt attempted a revisionist seventeenth-century historical
novel, or if W. G. Sebald had gone insane. In other words, there's
nothing else like it. Read it and see!" --Andrew Martin, author of
Early Work
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