Strange Attractor
The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna
$86.35
- Paperback
528 pages
- Release Date
7 October 2025
Summary
An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna.
A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was the twentieth century’s psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a riotous charmer who stalked the shadows, but also sought…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262049573 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0262049570 |
| Author: | Graham St John, Erik Davis |
| Publisher: | MIT Press Ltd |
| Imprint: | MIT Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 528 |
| Release Date: | 7 October 2025 |
| Weight: | 824g |
| Dimensions: | 35mm x 231mm x 155mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
“An account as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject.”
– Publishers Weekly
“ [A] delightful new biography.”
– Reason
“Due to St John’s intellectual reach, the book has, like a dark planet, drawn an entire menagerie of late 20th-century weirdness into its oblique orbit. With two appendices and 75 pages of notes, it is comprehensive and reference-heavy and seems to have left nothing unexamined in the labyrinth of the McKennaverse. The McKenna persona, familiar today from countless audio recordings strewn across the internet, is not so much invalidated here as given a merely human quality; the book is nothing if not the biography of a mortal. And for this we can be grateful, given the near-deification of McKenna that is well underway in some corners of the internet … The second part of the biography is a valiant attempt to lay out the various components of McKenna’s theoretical project, in what may constitute a groundwork for McKenna studies.”
– Los Angeles Review of Books
“A sympathetic and infectious travelogue of McKenna’s psychedelic multiverse, but also pretty unflinching and even rigorous in unpacking the very, very high weirdness.”
—Jesse Jarnow, author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America
“Excellent scholarship, eloquently written, and deeply illuminating of its subject… Now it is possible to see the complexity of the man behind the raps.” —Psychedelic Press
About The Author
Graham St John
Graham St John is a cultural anthropologist and a recent recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield where he is a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of ten books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace- A Cultural History of DMT, Global Tribe, and Technomad. He is founding Executive Editor of Dancecult- Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and has published widely on the ethnobiography of transformational events.
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