The Book of Tasks, Volume I : Atlantean Undertakings
by Christopher Spranger
LCCN: 2020945381
Published: September 21, 2022
Available in paper and e-book formats from these booksellers.
Paperback: $16.95 US | ISBN 978-1-878580-04-7
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E-Book: $9.99 US | ISBN 978-1-878580-05-4
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About the Book | About the Author | Praise
About the Book
“There are incompletable tasks. Tasks which are either impossible to accomplish or impossible to comprehend. Such tasks allow one neither the illusion nor the distraction nor the escape of what is styled “success.” On the contrary, the unperceived glory of perpetual failure is their sole promise. Far from whetting the appetite for worldly enterprise, tasks of this sort exercise a stunning and bewildering effect on the will, plunging it into a perplexity which borders on vertigo. Did it puff and pant before in frenzied pursuit of some hallucinated prize? Now look as, crawling to a halt, it sinks, as if seized with paralysis, into that luminous quiescence which hitherto eluded it! . . . When the will is quelled, the muscles go slack, and when the muscles go slack, the mind kicks into gear; then, on the ruins of volition, perspicacity erects itself. So the servitude to action ends, and the heroism of introspection begins.”
— Christopher Spranger
About the Author
Christopher Spranger is the author of The Effort to Fall (Green Integer) and The Comedy of Agony: A Book of Poisonous Contemplations (Leaping Dog Press, to be reissued soon by Coyote Arts). His dark philosophical ruminations cannot be forgotten nor imitated.
Praise for Christopher Spranger and The Book of Tasks
Like some sore of hybrid of La Rochefocald and Frankenstein, Christopher Spranger has dusted off that vernerable relic of literary taxonomy, the epigram, and reanimated it for the twenty-first century.
Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Through the alchemical magic of his marvelous prose, Spranger somehow manages to transform the inferno of human suffering into a luminous paradise of pure literary delight.
Edward Deville