Truisms
Alexander Theroux
January 2, 2023
ISBN 9798218049485 / Hardcover / 656 pages / $34.99
ISBN 9798218049546 / Paperback / 656 pages / $27.99

A singular work in Alexander Theroux's canon, Truisms distills a lifetime of reading and observation into thousands of rhyming quatrains, a modern Rubáiyát for our times. The book is a compendium of aphorisms, personal judgments, sharp maxims, sardonic insults, cranky complaints, abrupt advice, and improbable factoids that only Theroux could assemble.

The volume opens with a learned history of apothegms and epigrams, situating the work within a long tradition of compressed thought. "A truism," Theroux writes, "provides a way of seeing by way of the compendious and concise, the summary and the succinct, a thought closed like a door with a bang." Truisms is "the way I see the world," he concludes, and its appeal extends beyond his fans and to anyone who appreciates pithy proverbs.