Animal Joy

A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation

Animal Joy
Nuar Alsadir
RRP:
NZ$ 32.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 26.39
Paperback
h197 x 125mm - 320pg
2 Aug 2022 UK
International import eta 10-19 days
9781913097950
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughteris an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, orself-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from externalconstraints. Taking laughter' s revelatory capacity as a starting point,and rooted in Nuar Alsadir' s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, AnimalJoy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical,Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina' smorphine addiction, Freud' s unfreudian behaviors, marriage brokers and warbrokers to ' Not Jokes' , Abu Ghraib, Fanon' s negrophobia, smut, the BrettKavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, to how poetrycan wake us up. At the centre of the book, though, is the author' s relationshipwith her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions - frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer andher thinking - are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of beingsevered from our True Self and hinting at ways we might be called back to it. A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneityand feeling alive. ' To read Animal Joy is to become alive to the condition of wakefulness in the world. . . This is a work that will change conversations about who we are, what we think motivates us, what makes us us. ' - Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
' 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. The meeting place of the intentional and the unintentional erupts in Animal Joy in order that we might reinvestigate our incoming thoughts and feelings with a sense of vigor and curiosity. If you are open to introducing "tiny revolutions" of thought into your life by resisting received and uninterrogated scripts, read this book. ' - Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen ' Gorgeously written and by turns hilarious and crushing, Alsadir' s examination of humanity' s ' savage complexity' is not to be missed. ' - Publishers Weekly ' [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 ' Through the awesome and heterogeneous study of this book, laughter at first feels like the most enigmatic act, a convulsing creature in the psyche, in the home, in awkward publics, but then it is returned to us as the most true form of comprehension; an animal attitude to reality, a culturing note of corpsing, creasing and cracking up, that snags on the meaning of everything. ' - Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing ' 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. What happens when we wonder beneath or into that unexpected chortle or snort, that losing it, that dying, when we spend a little curious time with what, in fact, beyond sanction or affirmation, moves us? Re-makes us animal to ourselves? I' m not exactly sure, but I have a hunch that for lack of what is found there we die miserably every day. Nuar Alsadir has written such a beautiful and important book. ' - Ross Gay, author of Be Holding and The Book of Delights ' With Animal Joy Nuar Alsadir is in a relentless pursuit of authentic life, slaying the endless ways we accept falsehoods and store-packaged simulacrums, in search for what is beyond the obvious. Alsadir radically foregrounds inner over external reality as an act of subverting convention. Moving seamlessly between the most intimate to the political reality of our time, she leans hard into the absurd, harnessing the engines of psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and her poet' s love-hate relationship with language to bring back from exile what has been rendered unthinkable by social contract. Reading this book you are on a joy ride with the mind of a free thinker who will surprise you, make you laugh uncontrollably, and trouble you until you come out changed. You will gain a different relationship to what is before you, less tolerant of the lies and defenses that keep us apart from the impulse of our true self, joys, excitements, and devastations. ' - Orna Guralnik, Psychologist, Psychoanalyst, Couples Therapy (Showtime) ' Where do laughter, psychoanalysis, poetry, motherhood, creativity, thought, language, and so much more intersect? In Animal Joy Nuar Alsadir shows us in dazzling fashion, demonstrating what only the essay form, in the hands of a true artist, critic, and thinker, can achieve. ' - John Keene, author of Punks ' 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
Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst and is 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. Animal Joy is her prose debut. She lives in New York City.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781913097950
Published: 2 Aug 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: Paperback
Height: 197mm
Width: 125mm
Pages: 320

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information