The New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay
form with his collection of thoughts on time the creative mind and great lives and
worksIrrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not
happened may never happen or should or must or are indeed desired to happen but for which
there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as
counterfactual moods and include the conditional the subjunctive the optative and the
imperative-all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the
great prose stylists of his generation André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis
to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are
not about the present or the past or the future they are about what might have been but never
was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal
resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud
C. P. Cavafy W. G. Sebald John Sloan Éric Rohmer Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa and
portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection
on the imagination's power to forge a zone outside of time's intractable hold.
