About this item
Why can't we look away?Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible?In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies."His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human--for better and for worse.
About the Author
Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches British and American Romanticism, film and literature, and creative nonfiction. Wilson has recently turned his academic training into a major new trade title, EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD TRAIN WRECK: WHY WE CAN'T LOOK AWAY (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) , a mixture of memoir, journalism, scholarship, and cultural analysis that explores the origins, functions, and values of morbid curiosity. The book was recommended as one of the top books of the spring of 2012 by Oprah magazine, Details magazine, and Amazon.com; and it was positively reviewed in several publications, including NPR.com, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, the New Orleans Times Picayune, The Buffalo News, Booklist, Books and Culture, and Rue Morgue. Excerpts or adaptations have been published in Salon, The Christian Century, and Psychology Today, and the book has been featured in several radio venues. Wilson also achieved success with a 2008 scholarly-trade title, called AGAINST HAPPINESS: IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) . The book, an L.A. Times best seller, was featured on NBC's Today Show, UNC TV's Bookwatch, NPR's All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, as well as in Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times. Against Happiness was also favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Booklist, Bookforum, the Globe and Mail, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Playboy.com, Publisher's Weekly, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Christian Century, The Missouri Review, and the European Romantic Review. Excerpts have appeared in The Longman Reader, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the L.A. Times, and the book has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Croatian, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. Wilson has also published a memoir, THE MERCY OF ETERNITY: A MEMOIR OF DEPRESSION AND GRACE (Northwestern University Press) . His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Georgia Review, and r.kv.r.y. Wilson continues to produce more traditionally scholarly works, such as his recent MY BUSINESS IS TO CREATE: BLAKE'S INFINITE WRITING (University of Iowa Press) . His other academic books include THE STRANGE WORLD OF DAVID LYNCH (Continuum, 2007) ; SECRET CINEMA: GNOSTIC VISION IN FILM (Continuum, 2006) ; THE MELANCHOLY ANDROID: ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SACRED MACHINES (State University of New York Press, 2006) ; COLERIDGE'S MELANCHOLIA (University Press of Florida, 2004) ; THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF ICE (Palgrave Macmillan) ; ROMANTIC TURBULENCE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) ; and EMERSON'S SUBLIME SCIENCE (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) . These studies, along with his numerous articles on cinematic and literary subjects, have garnered Wilson several awards, including a fellowship at the National Humanities
