harry dodge

Dodge’s book of literary non-fiction:

“Diaristic and verbally unrestrained…Dodge could be called cocky, if his spirit weren’t so magnificently, sexily open.” —Wired

“Revelatory…I’ve never read another book like it…I came away from the book understanding so much more than I knew when I opened the book. That doesn’t happen all that often. Most of the time, books are telling me things I already know and if I’m lucky, the style is beautiful…[My Meteorite] thrilled me. What does it feel like to have managed to write a book that’s like a message from the beyond?…I am, dare I say, abject in my admiration for this book. —Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

“Harry Dodge’s voice and vision are singular, but his genius is for revealing how each of us is plural. This is a beautiful record of his loves and deaths and ways of making, but even its most intimate moments open out, become portals to other possible worlds. No genre can hold this book. It is a work of tender force, prying open every category. My Meteorite is breathtaking—or breathgiving, because the whole thing oxygenates discourse, makes me feel alive.” —Ben Lerner

• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
• One of LitHub‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2020
• Wired: Ultimate Summer Reading List
• Dazed: Books To Get Lost In

Interviews: The Nation, Bookworm, LitHub, AnOther, Los Angeles Review of Books

Praise for MY METEORITE:

“Dodge has offered a new, luminous angle on autobiography that not only traces where the body has been—but also what it loves, how it thinks and feels within the potent intellectual and physical detritus of its lived world. Reading this book is like being bathed in the bright, gritty sear of a comet’s tail. But the mark it leaves is stunningly terrestrial: a thumbprint of a mind on paper—singular in erudition, hurtfully wonder-struck, and true.”
—Ocean Vuong

“Captivating. My Meteorite holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend—so vulnerable, hot, funny, and casually weird that you don’t notice the profundity until you’re already walloped by it. Dodge juxtaposes the tenderest of human details with hungry, brain-splitting inquiries into the very premise of life, and these shifts in scale are incredibly moving and provocative. Don’t forget to notice that Dodge is a masterful writer; that’s how he pulls this whole thing off.” —Miranda July

“Harry Dodge’s fierce intelligence and love permeates and shapes every line of this book which is redolent with loss, desire, and truth. Expansive in scope and intimate in detail, Dodge’s account of becoming a self while living in a world defined by community, lifts the spirit as it feeds the mind. A major achievement.”—Hilton Als

“Harry’s book is ‘outside’ the book. Why should you read it? You’re out there too. I could say this is the smartest memoir I ever read but that’s pulling us back to the safe place. We are animals, machines, friends, reading things and we’ve never been talked to this way before. Seductive and wise, My Meteorite is the conversation you want.”—Eileen Myles

 “A thought-filled, deeply moving and personal book. The past, present, and future collide like Harry’s meteorite to earth. Life is tenderly felt, questioned, and affirmed within the pages of this exquisite prose.” —Catherine Opie

“Riveting. A freewheeling, feral romp through the wilderness of consciousness and connection!” —Eula Biss

“Picasso wrote meteoric poetry and now Harry Dodge has written a brilliant autobiographical manifesto that takes the accidents of death and birth and remixes them into a whirlwind unlike any book I can remember reading…Feel your whole body tingle as you read this blazing ode to randomness, to a cosmos where every particle and wave has a say in the matter.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

“How does one write a self that is constantly changing, remaking itself with each new experience? Harry Dodge does this with heart and intelligence in this raucous, tender book. An utterly absorbing tombola of subjects, a book about infinity, and possibility—of love, our own identities, the geographical boundaries of the universe. It’s a profound piece of work, and I feel honored to have read it. A modern masterpiece.” —Sinéad Gleeson

“Astute…Dodge’s memoir…entertains and enlightens.” —Publishers Weekly

“Transcendent.” —Booklist                                                                       

“Messy and exhilarating . . . there remains something miraculous about Dodge’s ability to find this ‘world-affirming interconnectedness’ in everything he witnesses.” —Times Literary Supplement: TLS

“Reading My Meteorite is to bear witness to an individual whose heart is at once so hungry and so full that it seems constantly on the edge of bursting.” —AV Club

“My Meteorite is energetic, challenging, surprising, and brilliant.” —BookRiot

“These are fascinating thoughts, and there are questions to make us think again on every page. [Dodge] also has a gift for storytelling . . . throughout there’s a feeling of a singular intelligence, driven by a set of related questions about the relationship between matter and spirit, or empiricism and the occult.” —The Guardian
 
“Truly beautiful.” —Dazed

“The writing [is] . . . viciously, animatedly good. . . Dodge’s mystical intimacy quest feeds back steadily and sustains.” —Bookforum 

“At once. memoir, studio diary and futuristic consideration of artificial intelligence, this is no ordinary Künstlerroman…a high-pressure, poetic approach to narrative and language that is also evident in much of Dodge’s raucous and extremely funny video work.” —Frieze

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Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? In his radiant and genre defying book, MY METEORITE: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Books trade paperback original; on sale March 17, 2020), artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.

An expansive meditation on materiality and bonding, MY METEORITE is structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life. He journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire, examining experiences of interconnectedness—with other humans, minerals, animals and plants—while also wrestling a deep sense of solitariness. The discovery of his birth family as an adult prompts the notion of a parallel world, where what might have been collides with what was, is, or could be. The titular meteorite reinforces the timely idea that nothing is immaterial, and that this world, in all its physical splendor, offers all the wonder and mystery one could desire. 

Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life. With MY METEORITE, he creates a literary universe of its own.  

SPACER