Books by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Examines philosophy as an event of the city and the city as an event of philosophy and how the intertwining of the two generates an urban imaginary.

In 'Kant in Hong Kong' travel, philosophy, and the city weave through one another. The book brings Immanuel Kant-famous for the regularity of his walks in his hometown of Königsberg-into the swarming streets of the hypermodern city and carries everyday urban experience into the labyrinthine texts of Kant's critical idealism. It lets the empirical and the transcendental play with one another in Kowloon, Hung Hom, Sheung Wan, and Admiralty as we move up and down the travelator between Queen's Road Central and the Mid-Levels, or take the bus to the beach at Shek-O. Freedom and knowledge swirl through the thick incense in the Temple of Tin Hau. When Kant comes to visit, walking, thinking, and the city illuminate one another more brightly than the colored lights of the nightly laser shows illuminate the harbor-front skyline of Hong Kong.

Night Café is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Café brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others. "These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sørensen) "When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Café, after inspecting the menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concave receptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination, reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafés of Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills are desirable & free!" (Robert Gibbons)