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Fitzcarraldo Editions is to publish poet, essayist and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir's debut work of non-fiction, Animal Joy.
Publisher Jacques Testard acquired world rights to the work, and subsequently sold North American rights to Graywolf Press editorial director Ethan Nosowsky. Fitzcarraldo Editions and Graywolf Press will publish simultaneously in autumn 2022.
Described as a "bold, extraordinarily curious, invigorating debut", Animal Joy explores what it means to be alive, using the author's own experiences and her relationship with her daughters. The synopsis explains: "Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in her experiences as a poet and psychoanalyst, Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present, alive, authentic and embodied. Writing in an associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, [Alsadir] ranges from clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Abu Ghraib, [Frantz] Fanon's negrophobia, smut, the [Brett] Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, slips of the tongue, [Sylvia] Plath's gnomes, hoarding, la petite mort, to how poetry startles and wakes us up. At the centre of the book is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who irrupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter, tiny revolutions."
Alsadir is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and works as a psychoanalyst in New York.
Commenting on the deal, Testard said: "Nuar is a brilliant writer and I am very excited to be working with her on Animal Joy, a wonderful, constantly surprising book, full of moments of light. She writes like a poet and thinks like no one else."
Graywolf's Nosowsky added: "All of us at Graywolf were immediately captivated by Nuar Alsadir’s exhilarating journey into the serious nature of laughter, which turns out to be a search for truth and authenticity. The warmth and intelligence she brings to the subject will delight, provoke and inspire its future readers."