The Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the oldest and strangest of all books, a masterpiece of world literature, a divination manual, and a magnet for the deranged
and the obsessive. InSixty-Four Chance Pieces, novelist and philosopher Will Buckingham puts theI Ching to work, using it to weave together 64 stories of chance and change, each
flowing from one of theI Ching’s 64 hexagrams. Moving between myth, fable, and travel writing, the collection offers an attempt to make sense of the maddening, changeable book that is
theI Ching, with tales of inventors and fox-spirits, ancient poets and nonexistent rulers, kleptomaniac pensioners and infernal bureaucrats. Like theI Ching itself, this new
Book of Changes is a puzzle, a conundrum, and a journey of many transformations, where nothing is quite what it seems.
