From the Publisher
Animal Joy is at once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. . . . The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis. Collectively these parts amount to an inspiring endorsement of shredding the filters of propriety wherever they are applied — personally, socially, creatively. . . . Yet, by sleight of pen, these philosophy-laden pages remain light and graceful. . . . Threaded throughout are accounts both movingly personal and endearingly experiential. . . . . The book is in effect a gift to the courageous. It offers an opportunity for self-reflection and growth. . . . Great art mainly makes you not think but feel. Animal Joy made me do both.”—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post
“As a poet and psychoanalyst, Alsadir is fascinated by the way moments that make us laugh and feel deeply happen when the tender and taboo parts of life see the light. When something – our deep laughter, our authentic grief – upends the narratives we’d rather keep steady, we also discover the possibility for transformation.”—Tess Taylor, CNN.com
“Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir offers a study of laughter in her deftly researched and personal book Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, which explores how laughter can help us connect not only to one another but also to our deepest selves.”—Annabel Gutterman, TIME, Best Books of 2022
“In one of the most enlivening works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, Alsadir presents laughter as a disruptive, spontaneous moment of revolution – a ludicrous, unstoppable bid for freedom. . . . Through the fragments, a bold and joyful argument emerges: a reclamation of authenticity, aliveness and contingency. It’s a book of small and vital awakenings; a book that might just inspire you to be yourself.”—Anna Metcalfe, The Guardian (UK)
“Alsadir is uniquely positioned as an excavator of human emotion. . . . She draws a constellation of interactions . . . [which are] essential components of her thinking. . . . Though the terrain Alsadir covers is vast and often feels tenuously connected, the resonant beauty of her prose helps guide the reader through a deliberately cluttered and complicated narrative. . . . Challenging and deeply rewarding.”—Celia Mattison, BookPage
“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
"Alsadir’s Granta essay on the emotional flagellation of clowning is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read, and her longer interrogation into the act—and release—of laughing is equally powerful and moving."—Courtney Maum, Lit Hub
“[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
“An astute, wide-ranging, and ultimately hopeful book.”—Melissa Febos, Bookforum
“Expansive and erudite. . . . Watching the motion of [Alsadir’s] mind across her capacious subject matter is captivating.”—Kathleen Rooney, LIBER Quarterly
“One of the most spectacular books I’ve ever read.”—Pip Adam, Radio New Zealand
“[Animal Joy] will leave you feeling enlightened and emboldened, and will even make you laugh.”—Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian (UK)
“Using personal experiences to develop and illustrate her arguments, Alsadir eschews the illusion of the disembodied, objective self that so often characterizes theoretical writing... Animal Joy makes visible the simultaneity of motherhood and scholarship and insists that women’s bodies are essential to intellectual life.”—Morgan Graham, Split Lip Magazine
“There’s a vibrant sense of play coursing through Animal Joy. . . . [The book] presents the abundance of a life; in its disappointments, its traumas, its wanderings, and its delights, there lies the possibility of recognition, the knowledge that you and I are sharing an impossibility, inanity, knowledge, and physicality.”—Annette Lepique, Stillpoint Magazine
“Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir juxtaposes motherhood with circus arts in this wondrous book on laughter and reframing perceptions of joy: “Recently,” she writes, “I noticed the word “moth” in the word “mother,” a tendency toward light.” Her writing creates a light all its own. A must read.”—Idra Novey, Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
“Practically every page is studded with sharp-as-a-tack insights ... Animal Joy is that rare work that suspends binocular rivalry in favor of a more supple, kaleidoscopic vision. (Radial, a close anagram for Alsadir, is another way of putting it.).”—Rhoda Feng, Parapraxis
“A braided essay covering spontaneity, self-management and humour, which reads as an analysis of vibrancy itself.”—Laura McLean-Ferris, Frieze
“Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy is a dazzlingly intelligent and associative essay on the value of spontaneity and laughter. Alsadir, who is a practicing psychoanalyst and a poet, writes with graceful exactitude, piling up breathtaking revelations throughout this marvelous book.”—Stephen Sparks, Lit Hub
“In Animal Joy Alsadir has dared to play true to her own 'gnomes and demons.' It is rare to read an account of parenting quite so open to the 'savage complexity' of human experience, and she charts her daughters’ responses to her and to the world at large with a candour that proves both uncomfortable and funny. This sense of personal risk lends the book a particular vibrancy, and it serves an important function: 'by behaving … in line with our instincts, we have the potential to provoke ourselves – and others – into possibility'.”—Kate Wakeling, Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“Intellectual yet accessible, Animal Joy is a juicy, joyful read...Here’s a mind that can go anywhere, too, and we are taken on a fascinating journey with an astonishing number of brilliant insights along the way as a result.”—Buzz Magazine (UK)
“A genuine masterpiece. Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy might be the best thing I’ve ever read on psychoanalysis and its deep connection to living a full, real, embodied life. Utterly compelling, radical, dizzyingly original, and beautiful, this is the work of a writer at the height of their powers.”—Rebecca Tamás, author of Strangers
“Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy is extravagant with revelations. Alsadir reads the human psyche with brilliant rigor and generosity, patiently prodding underneath the surface of human behavior, language, politics, and race to get at the root of the real. After I finished Animal Joy, I came away feeling more awake, more present, and more connected to myself and the world.”—Cathy Park Hong
“Nuar Alsadir has wandered fearlessly through the wordless regions of everyday life and returned intact, bearing this exhilaratingly personal and artful weave of stories and meditations. As precise as it is lyrical, Animal Joy invites us to attend anew to human feelings, those elusive, barely noticed entities transmitting everywhere, all the time, ‘with a frequency outside of measurement.’”—Josh Cohen, author of Not Working
“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
“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
“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
Library Journal
03/01/2022
With Animal Joy, poet/psychoanalyst Alsadir, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for the collection Fourth Person Singular, gets serious about studying the importance of laughter (30,000-copy first printing). Long-listed for the National Book Award and a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Ball was inspired by French writer/artist Édouard Levé's memoir (written at age 39) to offer his own frank Autoportrait in his 39th year. In 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was a model, muse, and friend to cultural greats and an artist, cabaret star, and driving force in her own right, as Braude (The Invisible Emperor) highlights in Kiki Man Ray. With Eliot After "The Waste Land," award-winning scholar/poet Crawford follows up his highly regarded Young Eliot (10,000-copy first printing). Standing as both memoir and memorial, Black Folk Could Fly is a first selection of personal nonfiction from the late author/mentor Kenan, whose award-winning works powerfully communicate his experience of being Black, gay, and Southern. Lowell's Memoirs collects the complete autobiographical prose of the great poet, including unpublished early work (10,000-copy first printing). What is home but A Place in the World, and Tuscany celebrant Mayes's new book explores what home really means in all its variations. As Morris explains in her first book of nonfiction, she came to the writing career launched with the multi-million-copy best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Listening Well (50,000-copy first printing). Composer of the Tony-nominated musical Once Upon a Mattress, author of the novel Freaky Friday and the follow-up screenplay, and chair of the Juilliard School, Rodgers has a lot more to discuss in Shy than being the daughter of Richard Rodgers (25,000-copy first printing). Addressed to Wohl's brother Bobby, who died in 1965, As It Turns Out reconstructs the life of their sister, the iconic actress/model Edie Sedgwick made famous by Andy Warhol (30,000-copy first printing).
Kirkus Reviews
2022-05-11
An Arab American psychoanalyst and poet investigates the social and psychological dimensions of laughter.
The book begins with Alsadir admitting to her fellow students at clown school that she is attending the course in order to research a book on laughter. From there, the author follows her thoughts and memories through a stream-of-consciousness series of observations on the roles that humor and laughter play in our lives. She remembers, for example, “corpsing,” or “breaking into convulsive laughter,” at a panel discussion during which a microphone glitch unexpectedly amplified the author saying the word ejaculation. As she describes it, “the sudden surge of my voice came at me through the speakers as a kind of horror vox, a disconcerting eruption of my interior into the external world.” In trying to understand her reaction, Alsadir ruminates on the roles that society asks us to play and what happens when we refuse to inhabit those roles. Over the course of a wide-ranging, sometimes scattered narrative, the author explores a host of topics: the relationship between joke structure and Donald Trump’s penchant for belittling others (“When we treat another being as inferior—try to disappear them—our underlying goal is to evacuate a threat to our boundaries of self that destabilizes the story we tell ourselves and others”), Sacha Baron Cohen’s discovery of “undercover comedy,” the effect of the superego on laughter, and the differences among candid camera shows around the world. Throughout, she weaves in personal stories about her family as well as concepts, quotes, and theories developed by Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Schopenhauer, Lacan, and many other philosophers and thinkers. At its best, the book is vulnerable, lyrical, and refreshingly incisive. At times, the author’s expansive, meandering style makes the prose feel more like a series of interesting anecdotes than a cohesive argument, but Alsadir’s quiet wit and depth of knowledge lead to unique insights and profound self-reflection.
A sprawling, poetic meditation on humor in all its forms.
