Larissa Pham "Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy" Book (2021)

Details: Larissa Pham's ode to love, loss, and finding meaning in diverse topics: travel, sex, drugs, music, and art. A beautiful and vulnerable book musing about art and intimacy. Released May 4th, 2021, hardcover, 288 pages. This item was shipped with a small amount of wear and slight paper tear on the bottom of the hardcover dust jacket. It is marked down to reflect this. Otherwise, looks great! Save $6.00!

Short Description: Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness."--Catapult

Grade: NM (new stock)

Full Description: A warm and expansive portrait of a woman's mind that feels at once singular and universal, this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed).

 Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.

Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.

Each of the essays in this debut collection reads like a mini-memoir . . . in which the author reflects on her experiences of young love, trauma, and transcendence through discussions of art and music . . . with an intimacy that is at once tender and expansive. --New York magazine

Author: Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.

Press: Throughout Pop Song, Pham blends her most intimate thoughts with stirring cultural criticism, with essays that make mention of Frank Ocean's music, Agnes Martin's paintings and more. Simultaneously, Pham wrestles with her own heartbreak and trauma as she finds solace in the art that surrounds her. --Annabel Gutterman, Time

Each of the essays in this debut collection reads like a mini-memoir in ekphrasis, in which the author reflects on her experiences of young love, trauma, and transcendence through discussions of art and music. Larissa Pham writes about Agnes Martin, Nan Goldin, and Frank Ocean with an intimacy that is at once tender and expansive. --Cornelia Channing, New York Magazine

A masterclass in emotional vulnerability . . . Pham has an uncanny ability to detect intimacy, especially in art . . . Pop Song pivots between art and personal narrative with such dexterity that they begin to feel inseparable. --Bryn Lovitt, Nylon

A stunning collection of essays that blends memoir with reflections on art and criticism . . . [Pham] is one of those writers whose words light a fire in your soul, making you restless with inspiration and the need to begin your own journey through the life-changing works of art and forgotten corners that have come to populate your life. --Allison McNearney, The Daily Beast

Pop Song is a triumphant collection, one that signals the author's commitment to recounting complicated experiences without fear or apology. --Evette Dionne, Bitch

The essays in this tender book balance artistic, academic engagement with personal narrative . . . This book offers a warm and expansive portrait of a woman's mind that feels at once singular and universal. --Annie Diamond, BuzzFeed

A sensual, intimate book; reading it is an experience akin to one of those unexpected, hours-long conversations that take place in a dark corner at a party, the kind that can only happen with someone you barely knew, but will now know forever. It's a reminder of the pleasures of casual intimacy, and how getting to know other people is often the best way of learning about yourself. --Kristin Iversen, Refinery 29

Pham is an acute chronicler of her own feelings as well as the everyday mundanities that we suffer through as humans. She is also something of a historian: of art, the internet, and the Vietnamese-American experience. If that sounds like too much for one book, don't worry: in Pham's deft hands, it's exactly the right amount. --Rebecca Schuh, BOMB

A tender heartache of a book, this memoir will make you feel seen in all the right ways. --K.W. Colyard, Bustle