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Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir
by Vidyan Ravinthiran
A perceptive exploration of poetry, race, and otherness from one of our most promising voices in criticism.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Drawing on the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one's aspirational brown parents to elocution lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.
"Beautifully written and impeccably argued, this meandering story focuses more on themes than chronology. While Ravinthiran's writing is often heartfelt, the book's academic register and insistence on literary analysis can, at times, create a sense of narrative distance between the author and his own story, as well as between the author and the reader. A gorgeous Sri Lankan British memoir." —Kirkus Reviews
"Written in soaring, exhilarating prose... . [T]his book will come to be seen as a turning point in writing about literature, race, identity, and otherness." ―Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice
"Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts." ―Tracy K. Smith, author of Such Color
"There's nothing like Asian/Other. ... I received an education I didn't know I needed until I had found it. Read it." ―Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids
This information about Asian/Other 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.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He writes both poetry and literary criticism. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.
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