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.

EXCERPT

“You exist in an endless series of iterations. You keep spinning out and out and out. Sometimes you take the form of a person and people, but you don’t stop there.

You are the places where people go to enact every hidden, silent fantasy—the cruelty and the beauty too—and you are the fantasies themselves, and the economies that shape and regulate them.

In my dreams I never fly, but I do breathe underwater.”

PRAISE

“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 Sunshine State 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

“Lerman isn’t content to just return the male gaze here. She dazzles it blind.”

-Heavy Feather Review

“This book had me hypnotized. It’s raw and and rigorous and sexy and relentless and completely on fire.”

- 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

“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 Dark Factory

Lindsay Lerman's first book I'm From Nowhere was published in 2019. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, Hobart, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is currently adapting her short story Real Love—which first appeared in NY Tyrant Magazine—for the screen. She is represented by Abby Walters at CAA.

OFFICIAL RELEASE JUNE 2022

ISBN: 9781944866969

COMES WITH CUSTOM POSTCARD

DESIGNED BY MATTHEW REVERT