Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. PREDICTIONARY is about blank spaces in language and culture and their formative role in conceptual and artistic creativity. It is a dictionary of would-be words that are designed to fill gaps in language and generate new concepts and meanings. Focused on the creative potential of a neologism and a dictionary entry, this book is dedicated to both poetry and poetics.

"There is a great deal of joy in this project, and playfulness that is rarely encountered in contemporary thinkers.... One of the movtives of this project is to find a language for what our systems of meaning exclude or render unimaginable."
—Mary Cappello, Professor of English, University of Rhode Island

Author City: ATLANTA, GA USA

Mikhail N. Epshtein is a literary theorist and critical thinker who moved from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1990. He is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and has conducted research on the future of humanities through Emory's Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He was founder and director of the Laboratory of Modern Culture in Moscow, and he maintains an array of interdisciplinary websites in the humanities, including (in English) InteLnet, Bank of Interdisciplinary Ideas, and Improvisations (Improvnet). He has authored 20 books and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. He recent books in English include Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry, 1999), and Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (2002).

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