The silence of animals

Even humans are capable of finding silence, if they can forget the silence they seek. From the author of the bestselling books Straw Dogs , Black Mass , and Gray's Anatomy , The Silence of the Animals explores humanity's questions about progress and other modern myths.

Why does man seek meaning in life? How does our imagination reach worlds so far removed from reality itself? Blending lyricism and wisdom, humor and seriousness, denial and bluntness, John Gray discusses how we deal with the world when we lose faith in progress and human moral evolution.

Drawing on references as diverse as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud, authors who explored the extremes of human experience—what happens to us when we are hungry, when we fight, when we are imprisoned—Gray draws from a rich tapestry of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to analyze the persistence of myth in the contemporary world and force us to reimagine our place in it.

Inquisitive and captivating, The Silence of Animals is a contemporary essay on how we base our existence on countless fictions, going around in circles to avoid admitting that we too are animals, separated from others only by our vanity.