Twins

William Viney is a researcher in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. His writing has appeared in Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, frieze, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Waste: A Philosophy of Things (2014).

"When William Viney writes about twins, he knows whereof he speaks. The author is himself a twin and his meticulously researched narrative of superstitions, fantasies and experiments reveals the way in which twins have long fascinated us and played a part in shaping our world." - Geographical Magazine"An intelligent and brilliant history, from ancient times to the present - a cultural history of twins which is also a collective history of their representations." - La Repubblica"The "metamorphic potential" of twins tells us as much about the values of a culture as it does about the mechanics of biology. Viney explores these complexities with style, achieving that rare balance of scholarly rigour and immense readability." - Fortean Times"a rich, interdisciplinary study . . . Twins is a carefully researched and clearly written account of how twins have been both feared and revered. Drawing from mythology, philosophy, and medicine, it shows how investigating notions of twins can aid our understanding of what it means to be human." - Folklore Journal"This is a book of probing intelligence, curiosity, and wit, of quickened fascination, and sometimes fear. Will Viney takes us on an ever-expanding and ever-more intimate journey through our ways of thinking about and with twins, the poetry, science, and theater of twin-ship. He explores what these help us to know of the human, and what they can make us blind to. Twins shifts the ways you see familiar things, and the ways we name the stranger ones." - Kenneth Gross, author of 'Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life'"William Viney unfolds what he calls the secret history of wonder attaching to twins, in a book that, in its intelligence and sinuous, intent inquisitiveness, is itself a thing of wonder. Ranging from ancient mythology to contemporary biotechnology, Viney explores the dualities that themselves define twins, as figures both of miracle and of menace. Mirroring with its polymorphous subject, Twins is a positive feat of superfetation." - Steven Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge