2023
First Published
4.32
Average Rating
158
Number of Pages
Somewhere between a journal and a report, a question and an answer, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche takes up the “only serious problem in philosophy” and submits it to the only kind of scrutiny proper to it: the personal. In arriving at this “personal” account, however, Nao detours through decidedly un-private, public cultural touchpoints—the lives of celebrities, religion, television shows, sporting events—and in doing so lays bare how even this most subjective of phenomena grows out of an endless encounter with the world. Race has a part in this encounter. So does migration. As does money. Growing out of these entanglements, queer affinities bud and bloom in this text—which, made up of pen-and-ink drawings, photographs, and Nao’s playful spin on pilish, is simultaneously constrained and unconstrained—to become the bonds that can make one want to live on.
Avg Rating
4.32
Number of Ratings
44
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
11%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
Vi Khi Nao
Author · 14 books
Vi Khi Nao holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of two novellas, Swans In Half-Mourning (2013) and The Vanishing Point of Desire (2011), and her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her manuscript, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, won the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. In Fall 2016, Coffee House Press will publish her novel Fish in Exile. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
