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A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
by Nuar Alsadir
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.
Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina's morphine addiction, Freud's un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to "Not Jokes," Abu Ghraib, Frantz's negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author's relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions―frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking―are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one's true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
"Gorgeously written and by turns hilarious and crushing, Alsadir's examination of humanity's 'savage complexity' is not to be missed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Animal Joy] is vulnerable, lyrical, and refreshingly incisive...Alsadir's quiet wit and depth of knowledge lead to unique insights and profound self-reflection." - Kirkus Reviews
"To read Animal Joy is to become alive to the condition of wakefulness in the world. This spectacular achievement by the psychoanalyst and writer Nuar Alsadir provokes and destabilizes our understanding of a life's competing narratives. I can think of no other contemporary work of nonfiction that brings together autobiography, a learned history of psychoanalysis, lyrical poetics, ontological investigations of our attempt to manage our own feelings with such astute engagement. This is a work that will change conversations about who we are, what we think motivates us, what makes us us." - Claudia Rankine
"Few things feel as important right now as what Nuar Alsadir is thinking about in her brilliant new book. She considers the ways in which, despite our most determined curation of our public-faces, and despite our approval-seeking and plain old quotidian bullshittery, laughter reveals to us (and sometimes others) what we might really feel...Nuar Alsadir has written such a beautiful and important book." - Ross Gay, author of Be Holding and The Book of Delights
"Nuar Alsadir's lyrical, hilarious and beautifully undefended meditation has the capacity to widen our consciousness to allow notice of what occurs in the interstices of attention and mortification. In that way, Animal Joy is a book that seems compassionately able to read us as we turn its pages." - Jonathan Lethem
This information about Animal Joy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst and the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.
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