Perception

Helen Keller's autobiography, written at twenty-two, is the account of a mind constructed against unusual constraints — deaf and blind from nineteen months old, she learned language at seven and went on to read and write…

Philip K. Dick's novel about a world where reality keeps decaying in ways the characters cannot quite identify — and Ubik, a commercial spray-on product that seems to restore it. Dick's register is unusual: paranoid scie…

Kosinski's fable about Chance the gardener—a man whose total blankness is mistaken for profound wisdom—is one of the twentieth century's sharpest satires of how institutions project meaning onto surfaces. For anyone dire…