Jonathan Gottschall

They picked up the keyboard to see if it tasted good. It didn’t, so they hammered it on the ground and screamed.

In short, it seems that the great dream of every statistician—of one day reading a copy of Hamlet handed over by an immortal supermonkey—is just a fantasy.

But perhaps the tribe of statisticians will be consoled by the literary scholar Jiro Tanaka, who points out that although Hamlet wasn’t technically written by a monkey, it was written by a primate, a great ape to be specific.

trading wild lies a

about brave tricksters and young lovers, selfless heroes and shrewd hunters, sad chiefs and wise crones, the origin of the sun and the stars, the nature of gods and spirits, and all the rest of it.

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories.

murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

This book is about the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Neverland.