{"product_id":"9780984475292","title":"The Self Unstable","description":"\u003cbr\u003eLiterary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection—unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the \"I\" in both literary and daily life: \"The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.\"\u003cp\u003e\"Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise.\"—\u003cem\u003eMake Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"... smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly 'reveal,' like the panopticon eye of a camera.\"—\u003cem\u003eThe Rumpus\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"... the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node.\"—\u003cem\u003eGently Read Literature\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Black Ocean","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47010036318448,"sku":"9780984475292","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780984475292_p0.jpg?v=1763887856","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780984475292","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}