Animal Joy Nuar Alsadir by Nuar Alsadir 9781644451816, 1644451816, B0B7G2WN35 instant download after payment.

"The author offers resonant insight on the uses of laughter to redistribute power... Most memorable are her personal asides... Gorgeously written and by turns hilarious and crushing, Alsadir’s examination of humanity’s 'savage complexity' is not to be missed."  -  Publishers Weekly

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. 

Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Nuar Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviours, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s Negrophobia, smut, Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. 

"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... The completed picture shows how humour, like any instinctual act, is fundamentally subversive... "  -  Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post

At the centre 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.