Lawrence Sutin - Spanning over two centuries, this inventive novel follows fictional writer Hector de Saint-Aureole and his novel, and includes imaginary responses from his imaginary readers. It is an intrepid, whimsical read that delights with its sense of play and twisting narrative

Lawrence Sutin, When to Go into the Water, Sarabande Books, 2009.

This short novel, interlaced with vintage postcard images, details in small chapters the life of Hector de Saint-Aureole, the author of a book of reflections entitled When to Go Into the Water. The novel contains a book within a book and multiple lives, including those of readers, within the protagonist’s life story.


In discrete, delightfully composed vignettes, Sutin, a biographer of Aleister Crowley and Philip K. Dick, tells the rags-to-riches story of a French peasant farmer. Born in 1900 on a farm in eastern France, Hector de Saint-Aureole, the humble protagonist of this clever pseudobiography, gravitates first to Paris, where he works as a renderer in an abattoir, then to London, where he becomes a barman in Bloomsbury. Luck strikes the young man in the form of a friendship with a Scotsman who dies and leaves Hector his considerable estate: “a fortune to assure a lifetime of ease and choice.” Hector sets out to explore the world, determined to leave a record of his passage, which takes the shape of his life's opus, When to Go into the Water . Sutin alternates this factual-sounding narrative of Hector's journeys with more contemporary dispatches about readers who have over the decades come upon Hector's work, e.g., “a fading male movie star of the 1990s.” It's fascinating to watch Sutin turn his biographer's wiles toward fiction, and the result is charmingly original and intelligent. - Publishers Weekly

Lawrence Sutin, The Seeming Unreality of Entomology, See Double Press, 2016. 


The Seeming Unreality of Entomology is a never-before published erasure book by Lawrence Sutin. It is a dream of spacious interspecies unity that also warns against the dire threat of knowing too much and finding it too little. Some of the pictures are funny.

Of Sutin’s work in the erasure genre, a Nepalese Sherpa has written: “When commencing a climb of a challenging peak, the last thing one wants to take along is a largish book with such engrossing content that it causes one to lose one’s way. If I were to pack such a book, I would pack Lawrence Sutin’s The Seeming Unreality of Etymology."

Learn more about Erasure.

All Is Change: The Two-Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West


A historical narrative that traces the exchanges between Buddhism and the West from the time of Alexander the Great to the current-day creation of a Western Buddhism, including the impacts of Western colonialism and orientalism.


A Postcard Memoir


This memoir is written in lyric and subjective short sections accompanied by images from postcards drawn from the author’s collection. The interplay of text and images (from other settings, other lives) and the exploration of inner experiences makes this a distinctive, experimental, yet accessible reading experience.


Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley


A full-scale biography of the leading Western occultist of the twentieth century, a man whose legendary status as “The Great Beast” has overshadowed both his genuine achievements and his genuine failures. Crowley was a brilliant modernist theoretician of Western esoteric thought.


Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance


This book, assembled from interviews with my parents Jack and Rochelle Sutin, provides a vivid account both of Jewish partisan life during World War Two and of a love that blossomed during the Holocaust and continued through sixty-eight years of marriage.


The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings


An assemblage of Philip K. Dick’s most significant essays with Exegesis material included as well.


In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis


The first selection from the late philosophical and personal notebooks of Philip K. Dick


Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick


The first major biography of Philip K. Dick, who in the years since this biography appeared has gone on to become a recognized master of twentieth-century American literature.

Why Do We Need to Think We Agree on Reality? — Lawrence Sutin