Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind

Unreal City: a zany cartoon megalopolis where towers are built of cotton candy, facts scatter like pixie dust, and the truth is whatever you feel it to be.

And it's no fantasy. It's where we live. We dwell in Unreal City. We believe in un-being.

With saber-like wit, poet and professor Anthony Esolen leads readers on a tour through the ruins of their own Western world--through king-size bookstores, manicured college campuses, strobe-lit choir lofts, mechanized farms, divorce courts, drag-queen libraries, and beyond. This hilarious guide to a culture gone mad with sex and self-care minces no words and spares no egos. We the people of Unreal City are no better, and certainly no smarter, than our fathers.

But fear not. Sex and the Unreal City insists there's no need to settle down in the ninth circle of unreality. Esolen lights a torch and heads up the well-trod path back to our cleaner, kinder, truer homeland: earth. Along the way, the author sings the songs of masters somehow long forgotten--Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, the evangelists--and asks us to chant along.

Readers of essayists like George Weigel, George Rutler, Malcom Muggeridge, and Walker Percy will enjoy this rollicking, intelligent book.

Anthony Esolen translated the Modern Library edition of The Divine Comedy, as well as the Johns Hopkins edition of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. An award-winning contributor to numerous periodicals, he has authored fourteen books of nonfiction, including Defending Boyhood, Out of the Ashes, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, as well as a book of poetry, The Hundredfold. He has taught at universities since 1987 and currently serves as professor of literature and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.