Out now from Metropolitan Books and Granta. Bookshop US // Bookshop UK
Shortlisted for English PEN’s Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2023 for historical nonfiction
A TLS Book of the Year 2021
Esquire’s Best Books of 2022
New York Times Editors’ Choice
“Accidental Gods is the sly, smart, and gloriously impious chronicle of mortal men who were mistakenly deified by dint of their race, but also sometimes because of their money, their technology, their power. Anna Della Subin has written their bible, which, unlike the earlier testaments, doesn't found a religion, but dissolves one.”
—Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers and The Netanyahus
"Bracingly original . . . brilliant . . . irresistible . . . Though Accidental Gods wears its learning lightly and is tremendous fun to read, it also includes a series of lyrical and thought-provoking meditations on the largest of themes . . . As Subin’s rich, captivating book shows, religion is a symbolic act: though we cannot control the circumstances, we all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time."
—Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books
"Who can make a god is as fascinating a question as who can kill one . . . Anna Della Subin writes beautifully of the spiritual life of marginalized people, taking their devotions seriously and revealing the subversive purpose and power of the beliefs and practices that their oppressors so often misunderstood . . . convincing . . . compassionate . . . compelling."
—Casey Cep, The New Yorker
"An irreverent bible in its own right, a sort of celestial thought experiment . . . On the one hand, Subin says, deification has been used to subjugate, to colonize, to oppress . . . But Subin also draws attention to deification’s emancipatory potential . . . A roving and ambitious book."
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“Accidental Gods is Anna Della Subin’s first book, and it is phenomenal—erudite, provocative, scandalous, and comic and tragic by turns. Her subject is how humans (mostly, she notes, men) get turned into gods.”
—John Carey, The Sunday Times
“Accidental Gods relates, with tremendous intellectual ingenuity and resourcefulness, a new history of the modern world: how the quest for divine sanction and spiritual transcendence remain at the center of our ostensibly rational and secular political and economic struggles.”
—Pankaj Mishra, author of Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire
“Riveting . . . The book is replete with astonishing details . . . Subin, who combines fierce analytic intelligence with powerful storytelling, has synthesized vast amounts of abstruse information [and] deftly places [apotheosis] in the broader context of imperialism… The challenge Subin’s book presents… is how to find a better array of myths.”
—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
“In Accidental Gods Anna Della Subin has unearthed a startling, unexpectedly rich stratum of the sacred. Witty, acerbic and often astonishing, Accidental Gods reveals how terror and divinity are intertwined—in the colonial enterprise, in present-day strong-leader cults, and in nationalist statecraft. A highly original, revelatory study, entertaining and sobering at once as it identifies a persistent danger: the mythopolitics that fails to distinguish between men and gods.”
—Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic
“While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon from Jesus Christ to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi, written with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to the comic aspects of her subject...”
—Rosemary Hill, London Review of Books
“Accidental Gods opens new perspectives, shines new light on overlooked corners of our global history, and conveys its powerful messages at first quietly, in subtext, and then more and more explicitly. The tales told here by Anna Della Subin are often colorful and bizarre, often melancholy—oh, man’s repeated inhumanity to man!—but always enlightening and engrossing.”
—Lydia Davis, author of The Collected Stories and Essays One and Two
"A beautifully written, subtly crafted history… It is the impulse to which Anna Della Subin is so sensitive in this inspiring book: the human need to discover love in beings other than ourselves, a need which grows into the pathetic human wish for superhumanity."
—A.N. Wilson, The Times Literary Supplement
“Accidental Gods is an intellectually thrilling, and compulsively readable, illumination of the historical forces––colonialism, racism, religion––that have shaped our world. Anna Della Subin is a non-fiction writer of rare brilliance: one who seamlessly combines deep, authoritative scholarship with real literary style and vitality.”
—Mark O’Connell, author of To Be A Machine
"With a stylish, playful, at times almost biblical authorial voice, as well as a keen eye for history’s most revealing paradoxes and charming cul-de-sacs, Subin restores to view . . . this dazzling pantheon of inadvertent deities."
—Ian Beacock, The New Republic
“Accidental Gods is an extraordinary book – a cabinet of curios and wonders, but also a fascinating study of how the strange human propensity for turning mortals into gods has shaped the great crises of history, from the colonial past to our own race-riven present. It is an original, idiosyncratic, thoroughly enjoyable work of history.”
—James Lasdun, author of Afternoon of a Faun
"Subin has a talent for digging up odd cul-de-sacs of thought that reveal the overall absurdity of colonial thinking and racist theology . . . Underneath the book's fascinating parade of ideas and historical snippets, the structure and sequencing are truly elegant . . . Powerful and persuasive."
—Daniel Hornsby, Bookforum
"Subin doesn't cover QAnon or Janauary 6, but reading her account of the global and historical power of the irrational, I became more and more convinced I might be reading the year's most relevant book about American politics."
—Tom Scocca
"Accidental Gods is a playful, ironic and ambiguous book about religion, at a time when religion . . . has grown as solemn as an owl. It’s no small achievement for Subin to have written something that, even as it explores the mostly grim religious dimensions of the colonial experience, does not reduce religion to politics but, to the contrary, leaves us hankering, like QAnon’s unlovely faithful, for a wider, wilder pantheon."
—Simon Ings, The Telegraph
"A fascinating tour through the endless diversity of the divine . . . Each chapter takes a new deity as its subject, while drawing together a vast range of sources . . . to create beautiful passages of rhythmical prose."
—Guy Stagg, The Spectator
"A work so singular as to be nearly phosphorescent . . . Accidental Gods is . . .a writerly feat . . . The narrative cartwheels around time and space in a way that gives the impression of a rushing fever dream or a mystical vision. Yet Subin’s sentences are never blurry—they’re brisk, precise, and wondrously nimble, defying the staggering density of detail (historical, literary, weird, funny) that they carry."
—Ania Szremski, 4Columns
“Accidental Gods is a book of history that sometimes reads like a poem, a rangy modernist one, with that tradition’s eye for imagery, juxtaposition, and paradox. Unlike the modernist poets, however, Anna Della Subin writes from an anticolonial perspective as she traces the ways that deification has revealed and responded to power all over the globe…. [Her] playful openness to metaphysical possibility … suggests that she remains invested in what the poet Robert Duncan called the “truth and life of myth.”
— Nate Klug, Commonweal
“Why do some people become gods? This is the question that Subin asks in an impressive study that travels from the Caribbean to the British Raj and back to the New World. This is no summary analysis, but rather a provocative and innovative study of imperialism, race, and decolonisation.”
—Ruth Harris
“A bravura performance... Fascinating, a searching study of the relation between the political and the divine written with great panache. Subin returns us to fundamental questions about human beings, their capacity for tyranny and violence, and their desire for transcendence. I learnt something from every page. A book to relish and to argue with, and a writer to watch.”
—Alison Light, author of Common People
