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Into the Zone: Audio Essays
From the acclaimed author of
White Tears
and
Red Pill
–a brilliant collection from Hari Kunzru's celebrated podcast.
Opposites and borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist's eye for the unexpected, author Hari Kunzru takes listeners into the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more. Along the way he meets philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, and together they investigate liminal spaces around the world.
Into the Audio Essays includes a new foreword and afterword providing bookends to a series of brilliantly crafted intersections on history and the evolution of identity.
Please This collection includes content that has been released in the podcast series.
Opposites and borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist's eye for the unexpected, author Hari Kunzru takes listeners into the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more. Along the way he meets philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, and together they investigate liminal spaces around the world.
Into the Audio Essays includes a new foreword and afterword providing bookends to a series of brilliantly crafted intersections on history and the evolution of identity.
Please This collection includes content that has been released in the podcast series.
- GenresNonfictionEssays
Audible Audio
Published July 12, 2022
About the author
Hari Kunzru
45 books1,027 followersHari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist, author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission and My Revolutions. Of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, he grew up in Essex. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 20, 2021
Interesting but at times a bit vague.
I think that at times it escapes the correlative nexus of the work.
I think that at times it escapes the correlative nexus of the work.
January 16, 2022
This audiobook of essays is unique in that it includes snippets of music from rare collections of jazz to Berlin punk, which are critical to the narrative. There are sound bytes of interviews woven in, which lends the production a sort of radio journalism quality.
Kunzru has a very engaging way of telling stories about unusual and captivating personalities, from Mme Blavatsky, the globe-trotting, fortune-reading creator of Theosophy, to Orlan, the French performance artist who presented to audiences live plastic surgery being done on her face. The narrator’s boundless curiosity, emanating from his voice, makes the discovery of each portrait feel intimate and immediate.
“In my twenties, I was depressed, and so I began studying philosophy” - one chapter begins. The author’s humorous observations about the state of philosophy in the Academy, the holy war between its Continental and Analytical strands — and to escape it all, the exciting early 2000’s underworld of the cyber-futurist / theoretical-humanistic punk hackerspace conferences of poetic cybernetic post-feminisms — that drunken island of lost lovers of philosophy, that brilliant mess.
It evoked such a feeling of nostalgia…the intellectual meanderings of my twenties, which little by little, led me away from the humanities and cyberfeminism, and deeper into computer science. It was the political implications of a free internet, and the punk poetics of cryptoparties where PGP keys were exchanged — that was the stuff that made the internet fun and interesting, that led me to want to build things with code.
The author captures a slice of that euphoria of ideas and art in his essays.
His abundant love of music, of sound, of the history of the technology of sound, of the precise technical qualities of MP3 compression, of the invisible engineering labor behind the simplicity of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” — all of that is communicated by the author in such a delightful way, which is enhanced by this audio form of storytelling.
The author presents his identity as an British-South Asian, mixed child of colonizer and colonized, and immigrant to Brooklyn. This lens of navigating the in-between serves as a guiding theme for these essays, which sit somewhere between the personal and the political, a monograph and a podcast, the historic and the futuristic. All in all, a beautiful achievement.
Kunzru has a very engaging way of telling stories about unusual and captivating personalities, from Mme Blavatsky, the globe-trotting, fortune-reading creator of Theosophy, to Orlan, the French performance artist who presented to audiences live plastic surgery being done on her face. The narrator’s boundless curiosity, emanating from his voice, makes the discovery of each portrait feel intimate and immediate.
“In my twenties, I was depressed, and so I began studying philosophy” - one chapter begins. The author’s humorous observations about the state of philosophy in the Academy, the holy war between its Continental and Analytical strands — and to escape it all, the exciting early 2000’s underworld of the cyber-futurist / theoretical-humanistic punk hackerspace conferences of poetic cybernetic post-feminisms — that drunken island of lost lovers of philosophy, that brilliant mess.
It evoked such a feeling of nostalgia…the intellectual meanderings of my twenties, which little by little, led me away from the humanities and cyberfeminism, and deeper into computer science. It was the political implications of a free internet, and the punk poetics of cryptoparties where PGP keys were exchanged — that was the stuff that made the internet fun and interesting, that led me to want to build things with code.
The author captures a slice of that euphoria of ideas and art in his essays.
His abundant love of music, of sound, of the history of the technology of sound, of the precise technical qualities of MP3 compression, of the invisible engineering labor behind the simplicity of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” — all of that is communicated by the author in such a delightful way, which is enhanced by this audio form of storytelling.
The author presents his identity as an British-South Asian, mixed child of colonizer and colonized, and immigrant to Brooklyn. This lens of navigating the in-between serves as a guiding theme for these essays, which sit somewhere between the personal and the political, a monograph and a podcast, the historic and the futuristic. All in all, a beautiful achievement.
June 9, 2025
A bit quirky, some extreme cases (some, a bit too bizarre) - but I think these were on the cards because of the subject matter.
I felt lost at times trying to correlate the real world examples with the crux of this title. I could not particularly connect to some of the eclectic items being discussed.
But I get it that what is black and white for one person maybe a shade of gray for another. This was clearly not something I would have dwelled upon for 5 hours.
Yet surprisingly, I ended up listening to this with a bit of surprise and sometimes with a chuckle! All thanks to the creator for doing the thorough homework, meeting people from such diverse backgrounds and getting their opinion. Their thoughts would, otherwise, have never entered my mind with such clarity.
The narrator also receives an applause for putting together an audiobook only version. It serves as a good example of how audiobooks can be elevated with appropriate amount of music. It was almost like listening to a podcast of a documentary.
I felt lost at times trying to correlate the real world examples with the crux of this title. I could not particularly connect to some of the eclectic items being discussed.
But I get it that what is black and white for one person maybe a shade of gray for another. This was clearly not something I would have dwelled upon for 5 hours.
Yet surprisingly, I ended up listening to this with a bit of surprise and sometimes with a chuckle! All thanks to the creator for doing the thorough homework, meeting people from such diverse backgrounds and getting their opinion. Their thoughts would, otherwise, have never entered my mind with such clarity.
The narrator also receives an applause for putting together an audiobook only version. It serves as a good example of how audiobooks can be elevated with appropriate amount of music. It was almost like listening to a podcast of a documentary.
October 1, 2026
This is great. I love all of Hari Kunzru's stuff. This reminds me of the thrill all those years ago when I read the Chuck Palahniuk book Stranger Than Fiction right when it came out. It was the first time I had read a nonfiction book by a fiction writer I admired, and saw them recycling from a nonfiction perspective something that I had encountered (sometimes for the very first time ever) in their fiction.
August 15, 2025
I love these essays!
I have sent so many grad students a link to “It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic” (alas I don’t think any of them have listened)… it’s my favorite thing ever about Adorno,
by which I mean the only thing I like about Adorno.
The essays on Stonehenge and on the creation of the mp3 format are also wonderful.
This is the Hari Kunzru I love!
I have sent so many grad students a link to “It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic” (alas I don’t think any of them have listened)… it’s my favorite thing ever about Adorno,
by which I mean the only thing I like about Adorno.
The essays on Stonehenge and on the creation of the mp3 format are also wonderful.
This is the Hari Kunzru I love!
July 23, 2025
Loved these essays about dialectics, posthumanism, recording technology, 90s graduate conference on virtual futures encountering Stelarc and Orlan for the first time. Wonderful synthesis of ideas in a way I enjoy reading.
April 6, 2026
It was fun and I learned things, though I did not consent to listen to a podcast under the pretense of it being an audiobook.
August 24, 2026
Kunzru’s a genius and the sound quality was CRISP. I only wish it had another season.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews