The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure

Literary Nonfiction. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion.

"A few possible answers gleaned from this book include: how to mourn a blur, analyze 'an accident shaped like an umbrella,' or create a lecture that thinks like a poem. This book sets itself up to fail, calling itself THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD And then suddenly it is."—Jen Bervin

"In these three of Matthew Goulish's lectures on failure, language, thought, and feeling add up with stunningly multiplicative affect, where scope—conceptual, historical, political, intimate—expands and contracts across discontinuous trajectories of domains and sources. They are lectures resonant without intra-subjective expertise, on failure, of failure, of only the most active, transparent and absorbing synapse-firing, generous kinds."—Jesse Seldess