The Jamais Vu Papers: Or Misadventures in the Worlds of Science, Myth, and Magic

Did you ever get the feeling you've NEVER been here before? Once upon a time in Los Angeles, an addled psychiatrist named Hector Glasco was vainly trying to treat a jaded celebrity named Hilary, who suffered from a chronic and perhaps potentially fatal case of déjà vu-that condition, of course, in which one has the weirdest feeling that one has been here before. The cure, it seemed, was to instill a sense of jamais vu, a mysterious feeling that one has never been here before-not in this world, this life, or the most familiar circumstances. This tale of Hector's quest includes a bizarre secret society, a cut-rate Venice Beach shaman, a demented deconstructionist scholar, and the elderly ladies of The Elmblight, Ohio, Book Club and Sewing Circle, who in the course of reading The Jamais Vu Papers manage to become a part of the story, threatening to disrupt the fabric of reality. Real-life people who agreed to take part in the story include Daniel C. Dennett, Tom Robbins, Fred Alan Wolf, Paul Krassner, Fred Chappell, John Brockman, María De Céspedes, Timothy Leary, and Jamake Highwater. The storytelling style has been described as "metafiction," and (by Publishers Weekly) as "Seminally integrating illustrations and text." First published by Harmony Books/Crown in 1991, The Jamais Vu Papers has built a solid following over the years. Eventually, the shortage of recirculating copies drove prices so high that it was clearly time for a new edition. So here again is The Jamais Vu Papers--the entire original book plus a bonus tale and some words about the origins of the whole idea.