What Are You

Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation. Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. 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. "An incantatory and hypnotic work of voice, What Are You exists at the apex of creation and destruction, desire and shame, innocence and experience, violence and tenderness, rapture and suffering, hunger and the denial of flesh. To read it is to feel the terror of falling from a great height-but wanting to; maybe even choosing to jump." -Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star and True Love "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 "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 "Passionate, dispassionate, hypnotic, deadpan, ecstatic, Lindsay Lerman's What Are You, read it now. Now." -Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher and Dark Factory "Lerman's prose evades categorical thinking and forces you to reconcile yourself to the fact that individuals and their worlds are dynamic, reflexive, and reciprocally determined. It's a slippery book that demands we deal with it in its full complexity, without recourse to the simplifying unities we would normally use to reduce people to what they aren't. Lindsay Lerman is insidiously powerful; you don't realize what she's done to you until it's done. Purgatory in the sense of catharsis, a text for devouring and devotion." -Charlene Elsby, author of Hexis and Psychros "Holy shit! This book had me hypnotized. It's raw and rigorous and sexy and relentless and completely on fire - it's a cold beer beside an active volcano, and it's delicious. Like Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson, 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 "Lindsay Lerman gives a sense that the author and the reader are on the run together, foraging a path of discovery as they flee. With prose both beautiful and relentlessly shifting with experiment, this book meets the reader at not-knowing and carries them forward, scouting the territory just one step ahead." -Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City and Transmutation