We're proud to announce that the new edition of
The Jamais Vu Papers has won the
Visionary Fiction category of the
International Book Awards.

And the new edition received an Honorable Mention in the Spiritual category of the 2011
Eric Hoffer Book Awards. It was also on the short list for the Montaigne Medal given by the Hoffer Awards for "the most thought-provoking titles … books that either illuminate, progress, or redirect thought."

The Jamais Vu Papers
Or, Misadventures in the Worlds of
Science, Myth, and Magic

—2010 edition—

• Reproduction of the entire 1991 edition as it was first published by Harmony Books/Crown.
• "Why and How?" the book came to be.
• "Participatory Storytelling," an excerpt from an interview by Vance Lehmkuhl.
• A bonus story from the original newsletter, in which the Goddess and Quetzalcoatl report and comment on the Harmonic Convergence.
• "About the Authors & Their Other Books"

Before there was a book, The Jamais Vu Papers actually was a newsletter, pasted up, printed at a copy shop, and mailed out to a small group of subscribers. During that time, we had some t-shirts made and stocked up on them in various sizes. We mailed them to those who ordered them and to those who participated in the story. If you have a photo that includes an original Jamais Vu T-shirt or one of the pre-book newsletters (circa 1989-90), email us the image with permission to show it on our website, give us your address, and we'll send you a free 2010 edition of The Jamais Vu Papers.

The story: Once upon a time in Los Angeles, an addled psychiatrist named Hector Glasco was vainly trying to treat a jaded celebrity named Hilary, who was suffering from a chronic and perhaps potentially fatal case of déjà vu—that condition, of course, in which one has the weirdest feeling that one has been here before. The cure, it seemed, was to instill a sense of jamais vu, a mysterious feeling that one has never been here before—not in this world, this life, or the most familiar circumstances.

On the advice of the celebrated neuroscientist Imogene Savonarola, Hector administered a drug called M to Hilary. M was the chemical equivalent of a metaphor, meant to act on the brain’s oxymorphins, the newly-discovered neurotransmitters for paradox. Put more simply, M was the most powerful placebo ever created. Hilary swallowed the capsule, then disappeared—and there began Hector Glasco’s mythic quest, for his missing patient, for self-understanding, and for the secrets of the universe itself.

Jamais Vu has a rather bizarre cast: a secret society known as The Ancient Order of the Brothers and Sisters of Thaumaturgy, bent on a nefarious scheme to unite the worlds of waking and sleeping; the elderly ladies of The Elmblight, Ohio, Book Club and Sewing Circle, who in the course of reading The Jamais Vu Papers manage to become a part of the story, threatening to disrupt the fabric of reality; a cut-rate Venice Beach shaman named Bruno the Brujo; a demented deconstructionist scholar; the Cardiff Giant; and King Solomon himself.

Jamais Vu also includes a glittering cast of real-life guest stars who agreed to appear in the novel:

• author Tom Robbins, discussing time, history, and the pizza delivery zone
• physicist Fred Alan Wolf, grappling with an interdimensional entity named Llixgrijb who dreams our world into existence
• Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner, explaining the uses of “preventative journalism”
• poet Fred Chappell, whose answer to a question that nobody asks is, “Yes, do”
• literary agent John Brockman, who peremptorily refuses to represent Hector Glasco because he’s “just another psychiatrist with a book idea”
• cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who explains how a fictional character can, indeed, achieve consciousness.

Other guest stars have, alas, left this earthly existence:

• the theatrical puppeteer and storyteller María De Cespedes, who turns out to be a puppet herself
• the critic and novelist Jamake Highwater, who warns that “We often end up munching on cardboard when we insist that we are dealing with reality”
• the famous neuronaut Timothy Leary, who serves as a garrulous tour guide to a distant cybernetic future.
  

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