Lawrence Weschler's Uncanny Valley

With Walter Murch.

Uncanny Valley collects the best of Lawrence Weschler's narrative nonfiction from the past 15 years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession.

Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer’s block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures.

With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the “world is strange, beautiful, and connected” (The Globe and Mail), demonstrating his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

Lawrence Weschler is regarded as one of the leading practitioners of literary nonfiction. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker for over twenty years, and his series of “Convergences” is a regular feature in McSweeney’s Quarterly. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, he is the author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. True To Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. and Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, among many other books; he teaches at New York University.

Walter Murch has been editing sound in Hollywood since starting on Francis Ford Coppola's film The Rain People (1969). He edited sound on American Graffiti (1973) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), won his first Academy Award nomination for The Conversation (1974), won his first Oscar for Apocalypse Now (1979), and won an unprecedented double Oscar for sound and film editing for his work on The English Patient (1996). More recently he helped reconstruct Touch of Evil (1958) to Orson Welles' original notes, and edited The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Mr. Murch was, along with George Lucas and Francis Coppola, a founding member of northern California cinema. As an editor and sound man he is one of the few universally acknowledged masters in his field.  He is the author of In the Blink of an Eye.

.