Trickster Makes This World: How The Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture
By Lewis Hyde
Canongate £16.99, 432 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

How has Lewis Hyde survived into the 21st century? The last of the last romantics, Hyde’s effrontery is to launch hippy 1960s idealism as a weapon against the American marketplace and its commodified culture. It is a battle he opened with his cult book The Gift, an impassioned defence of art as a non-commercial practice. Trickster Makes This World, here published for the first time in the UK, continues the fight, contending that cultures only flourish and develop if they are open to the disruptive intelligence of wise jokers, holy fools, and other outlandish creators who artfully change how we think.