Book of the Year 2022
Luke Burgis, author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, joins us for a brief conversation. His book is our Book of the Year for 2022.
Are there one or two authors that have had an outsized influence on your work overall?
I suppose René Girard (who inspired Wanting) is too obvious of a name, so I’ll name a couple of others. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Incerto series) is one. I believe he invented a new sub-genre of non-fiction that is kind of an anti-genre, a melting pot of forms that defies easy categorization and reflects the personality of the author more than any of the familiar forms (Gladwellian, Michael Lewisian, etc.) that have come to characterize so many popular non-fiction books the past two decades. Another would be Brené Brown, who brings a level of tenderness, vulnerability, and spirituality to her writing. I believe in the coincidence and co-existence of opposites.
Do you have a favorite novel or novelist or fiction genre?
I think Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes is the greatest novel of all time. Some other favorites are East of Eden by Steinbeck, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, and the Elena Ferrante books. So I suppose I enjoy magical realism, surrealism, and characters who develop interesting views of the world and allow me to get inside their heads and stay for a while—the way Kundera writes in Unbearable Lightness. And the writing in all of these books is numinous.
Can we expect more books from you in the future?
Yes. I am too early in the process to say anything about the next book in the works—it hasn’t went to auction and found a publisher yet. But it is non-fiction, and it’s an undertaking bigger than Wanting in the sense that I am stepping back and tackling something fundamental that lives outside of any social theory, which affects every one of us on a personal level. I’m nervous about writing it. As I should be.
