Description

Whatever the ideological slant of our information feeds nowadays we all share a sense of bingewatching the apocalypse Facing so much uncertainty we need a language for thinking about the unknown not simply as a threat but also as a space of fertile possibility George Prochnik has chosen to reflect on these urgent themes through the lens of a personal narrative an account of his own familys decision to leave the United States

I Dream with Open Eyes begins with an exploration of Prochniks ancestral past the pilgrimage of his mothers family who were among the first English settlers in the New World In the aftermath of the 2016 election a parallel migration unfolds as Prochnik along with his wife and their son makes the decision to uproot their lives in New York to move to England

A deep critique of this current moment Prochnik takes the words of nineteenthcentury poet Heinrich Heine I dream with open eyes and my eyes see as an inspiration to ask how as a society we might use art and literature to refract and expand our vision of the future while simultaneously generating a new focus on present realities