Asian/Other
Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Icon Books
Publishing:16th Jan '25
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 16th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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 - as these concepts fuse, or fail to, at different times and in different places - he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, he 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.
How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, "how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, 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, poet *
Written in soaring, exhilarating prose, with the sentences impatient to pack in more ? more ideas, more thought, more life ? this book will come to be seen as a turning point in writing about literature, race, identity, and otherness. * Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice *
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 *
A moving love story to fathers and sons who endure with dignity despite the misunderstandings they encounter. This is a persistently illuminating and inspiring memoir that somehow transforms the aesthetics of literature into a guide for good living. Original, wise, witty and exciting! * Daljit Nagra, author of Look We Having Coming to Dover! *
Ravinthiran brilliantly blends the poetic, the personal and the political as he skilfully explores 'the problem of memoir'. A poet I've long admired, who makes a true success of the journey into prose. * Andrew McMillan, author of Pity *
Beautifully written and impeccably argued. * Kirkus *
To witness Vidyan Ravinthiran thinking is a privilege. In this generous, vulnerable memoir he takes on cultural flashpoints - race, identity, neurodiversity, cultural appropriation - with a stubborn compassion, refusing to simplify arguments or monster others. One of the best critics of our generation. Ravinthiran is a writer of uncommon brilliance, and it is a pleasure to follow the lucid wanderings of his mind. * Clare Pollard, author of Delphi *
ISBN: 9781785788628
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages