"Laird Hunt is a sentence writer in whose hand the sentences turn like prisms, reframing these essays' collective horizon. It's a collection of dazzling stuff. . . . Masterly." -Garin Cycholl, Chicago Review of Books

"Deliberately digressive personal essays on the intersection of art, history, and happenstance. . . . [Hunt] writes with a poetic sensibility, letting the metaphorical meaning and depth of his observations arise naturally out of his prose without laboring to extract them." --Kirkus

"Hunt has written a mesmerizing, entrancing chronicle of the one who exists above the ground, and the one who is inexorably drawn to the world far below, where the Radium Girls still burn, where Ella Cruse lays crackling, where in Sicily's catacombs, riotous, celebratory, the dead in crepe and velvet beckon. In the midst of life and thinking and storytelling, 'thinking and dreaming gone to ruin.' A mysterious, often thrilling collection, beautifully done." --Carole Maso

"This Wide Terraqueous World is a luminous gem of a book. Brimming with unexpected insights at every turn--whether visiting W. G. Sebald's grave or Willa Cather's Red Cloud or observing donkeys at a distance in China, Corsica, California--here is an account of a writer's life in which verifiable truths and an unfettered imagination work together brilliantly. Acting as a kind of post-postmodern Virgil, Hunt takes us on a journey in which travelogue melds with philosophy, literary acumen informs cultural observation, and far-ranging memories are set free by an unusually prodigious curiosity about every large and little thing. A kaleidoscope of genre-defying essays that leaves the reader frankly awestruck, This Wide Terraqueous World is a book to celebrate and treasure." --Bradford Morrow

"Heads or Tails? An ancient game of chance. And what of the middle, the space between the head and tail? If it is, it is in the flip; it is in the moment of the coin glinting in its unfixed oscillation amidst this radiant uncertainty. It is here that I locate Laird Hunt's visionary prose. Between the uncanny crisp edge of the detail and the blurred seam where a scene once collected, between remembering and forgetting, between the self and the act of writing, between the painted tiles that decorated the childhood nursery and those that now punctuate the scene of language's attempts, there is something, but what? Love, like a fact. How strange--that we get to be here. A stunning master class in both awareness and exquisite prose, This Wide Terraqueous World reminds us that Laird Hunt is one of the greatest writers of our time." --Selah Saterstrom