CENTURY OF EMPATHY BY TIMOTHY DYKE (DEBUT LITERARY NOVEL) *PRE-ORDER*

A writer in his sixties knows that his most significant relationships are friendships. As he catalogues them by 100s, he can’t stop thinking about empathy. Empathy: the force that allows him to accept his past actions—the ingredient of successful relationships. But can empathy be misused? Can it intrude on the privacy of others? Can it be placed in the wrong hands? He begins to invent new and speculative ways to tell his own story. Century of Empathy is a book about how we tell stories, how we love, and how we develop the kind of empathy that connects us all in genuine ways.

“In this intimate, smart, and hilarious narrative salad, Timothy Dyke lays bare “Tim Dyke” and “his” complicated relationship with empathy, friendship, football, poetry, storytelling, truth, how many angels can dance on the head of a bowling pin, life, death, grief, and a great deal besides. This is autometaspecnonfiction at its finest.” —Tom Gammarino, author of The Yellows

“An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written,” wrote Thomas Traherne in his First Century of Meditations. Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart write in The Hundreds: “Every day a friend across the ocean wakes up to suicidal thoughts,” followed by a catalog of “First Things” of what friends do each morning. Timothy Dyke’s new book of prose meditations on friendship and spirit also arrives in “a century.”  Each chapter of this marvelous book contains 100 pieces that assert, circle, retreat, and push forward, adding up to a deep contemplation of friendship and its boon companion, empathy. It’s also a book about writing prose (as poetry), looking at art and skin, considering queer identity, sitting in chairs and words, watching sports on television. Everything, in other words. It’s an autobiography of feeling, written through the mostly mundane (and sometimes surreal) events of one’s life. It offers an honest and necessary correction to our anti-empathetic era.” —Susan M. Schultz, author of Meditations and War Diary

“In Century of Empathy, Timothy Dyke employs the collage essay to expand the limits of memoir. The writing is, in turns, hilarious, earnest, tough, full of grace, always insightful, and driven by a desire to understand the many ways we choose to reveal our love for others. I loved the cyclic quality of this storytelling, how Timothy returns us to earlier moments with a new lens, always deepening our understanding, our empathy, for the characters, the narrators, and our selves.” —Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This Is Paradise: Stories

“I love how Century of Empathy productively weaponizes the space between genres: Timothy Dyke is writing a novel; Timothy Dyke is writing a memoir. Timothy Dyke is writing a combination pizza hut taco bell weirdo novel memoir in the form of a series of numbered, cascading lists, carving out a new form. It asks: Are we true? Are we fiction? Most of us are at least a little bit of both, and all art that matters is too. This is art that matters. It matters a whole fucking lot.”

— Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir and Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, an Obsession

“Timothy Dyke’s Century of Empathy resists genre categorization in the best way. More than anything, it is a book examining thought and perception. Dyke’s writing interrogates the very idea of nonfiction, weaving personal experiences with myth, gossip, sports history, teaching (as both teacher and student), addiction, queerness, music, film, and identity as a whole. Century of Empathy encourages the reader to think more deeply about themselves and their relationship to the world. I was utterly transfixed.”

— River Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire

“In this age of ultra-intentionality, Century of Empathy reclaims the essay’s wager of always telling the truth, but only by accident. In what seems to be promise and plea, apologies made in advance and in retrospect, these essays gather and disperse the memories of a life lived both fully engaged and in omission — all the while leading us into the shadowlands of what could never be said, only to be invited to find ourselves. Timothy Dyke is the essayist we have all always known beforehand and have finally discovered.”

— Larry Lacambra Ypil, author of The Experiment of the Tropics

TIMOTHY DYKE is a teacher and writer who lives with parrots in Hawai‘i. He is the author of the Tinfish Press poetry collections Awkward Hugger, MAGA and Atoms of Muses. In 2025, High Frequency Press published his memoir (with lies in it) Backbends. His writing has appeared in numerous journals. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Since 1992, Timothy has taught English to young people at Punahou School in Honolulu.

FORTHCOMING FEBRUARY 9. PAPERBACK: ISBN: 978-1-962931-86-1 AND EBOOK: EISBN: 978-1-962931-87-8. LCCN: 2026913947.