I Am Alive and You Are Dead

An award-winning author's literary biography "captures . . . [Dick's] sense of humor, his intellectual curiosity, his very human vulnerability . . . Compelling" (Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle).

For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the "one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) but a source of divine revelation. In the riveting style that won accolades for The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead, follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink light, three-eyed invaders, and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews as well as unpublished sources, Carrère vividly conjures the spirit of this restless observer of American postwar malaise who subverted the materials of science fiction—parallel universes, intricate time loops, collective delusions—to create classic works of contemporary anxiety.


"Strange, fascinating man, and this a strange, fascinating book." —The San Diego Union Tribune

"Remarkable. . . . Informed, affectionate, sardonic . . . crystal clear." —John Leonard, Harper's

"Brilliantly written . . . Carrère combines fact and fiction to form a new sort of genre, blending literary criticism and cultural history with a novelist's earnest speculation." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Remarkably vivid, intimate, often haunting." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Riveting." —Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

"Every whorl of Dick's mind, every delusion, every leap through the looking glass, is chronicled. The effect is powerful." —James Parker, The Boston Globe