The New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and worksIrrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happenIrrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative-all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, Andre Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the presentIrrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the tem