Publisher: CLASH Books
Language: English
Length: 188 pages
What Are You
Can a book be a dark night of study?
Radically imaginative and intense, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation in 50 acts. Hypnotic, dreamlike fragments tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction, going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back.
“What Are You is a groundbreaking work of fiction that uses the metaphysics of violence and desire to completely reconfigure our understanding of how the story of growing up in America can be lived and told.”
– Ryan Ruby, critic, author of Context Collapse
“You will be changed.”
– Buzzfeed Books
“Lindsay Lerman is brilliant. This book manages to be fiercely direct and enigmatic at the same time. It hit me the way Duras, Zambreno, and Lispector do.”
– Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book and Ripcord
“An exquisite ‘story’ of longing and destruction that confronts, evades, and embraces the reader all at once. Alternatively, imagine that Hélène Cixous is (re-)born in the 1980s and raised on the edges of the Arizona desert: What Are You is what you get.”
– Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation and The Lives of Artists
“This book had me hypnotized. It’s raw and rigorous and sexy and relentless and completely on fire. What Are You wrestles critical theory to the ground and emerges with a triumphant, radical, thrilling, clarifying, new form of writing about sex, feminism, and the self.”
– Kate Reed Petty, author of True Story
“What Are You is relentlessly and elegantly erudite, yet deeply felt and compulsively readable. There is nothing in literature, philosophy, or her own life that seems beyond Lerman’s capable grasp. She has a particular genius for weaving together disparate elements that would leave a lesser writer dumbfounded.”
– Nicola Maye Goldberg, author of Nothing Can Hurt You
“What Are You is an exercise in intimacy and distance […] Lerman knows, in a way that is simultaneously singular and universal, that love cannot exist without hate, that only the powerless know real power. Lerman’s prose has the infectious lyricism of a pop song and the haunting power of a spell. You’ll never quite be able to get it out of you—but you won’t want to. Her voice is truly one in a generation.”
– Francesca Kritikos, author of Sweet Bloody Salty Clean and editor-in-chief of SARKA
“Passionate, dispassionate, hypnotic, deadpan, ecstatic, Lindsay Lerman’s What Are You, read it now. Now.”
– Kathe Koje, author of The Cipher
LA Review of Books Analysis “Lerman’s novel radically questions whether or not the limitations we impose upon both consciousness and the world are superficial impositions, as are the representations of those things in literary works.”
Heavy Feather Review “What Are You is a dangerous read for the ages. May we all take the risk.”
Interview with Wake Island “This book is an argument for why text and reading are so important. […] You have to be the body in this book.”