Bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works. Homo Irrealis explores what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis 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. A deep reflection on the imagination's power to forge a zone outside of time's intractable hold.