The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

The Exegesis is Philip K. Dick's private philosophical journal, maintained in manuscript for the last eight years of his life. It runs to approximately eight thousand handwritten pages, composed almost entirely at night, in which Dick worked obsessively to understand a series of visionary experiences he had in February and March 1974, which he referred to shorthand as "2-3-74." The visions, which included a pink beam of light, voices, and what he interpreted as contact with an external intelligence, became the central preoccupation of his final decade and the direct inspiration for the VALIS trilogy. Dick never arrived at a satisfactory explanation. The theories proposed and discarded across the Exegesis range from Gnostic theology and Neoplatonism to Soviet mind control, temporal anomaly, and psychosis. This edition, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem with annotations by Erik Davis, selects and organizes material from the full manuscript for the first time in a commercially published form. An excerpt appeared prior to publication in Playboy.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bronze colored boards. Nearly 1,000 pages with index. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Wintz & Hyde NF11. ISBN: 9780547549255. #11064.
Fine in fine dust jacket.