The Undying by Anne Boyer

The Undying by Anne Boyer

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2020
WINNER OF THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2020
FINALIST FOR THE PEN / JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD 2020


'Profound and unforgettable' Sally Rooney
'A classic . . . I have long thought of Boyer as a genius' Patricia Lockwood
'An outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique' Ben Lerner
'Some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read' Hari Kunzru

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Anne Boyer is an essential voice, and this is an essential book: one body's urgent attempt at finding a language to tell us what it knows -- Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
This is a powerful, timely, and troubling bookBoyer's unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read -- Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

Anne Boyer is a U.S. poet and essayist. In 2018 she was the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry and the recipient of a Whiting Award in non-fiction/poetry. Her books include A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018) as well as several volumes of poetry, including The Romance of Happy Workers (2008) and the CLMP Firecracker Award-winning Garments Against Women (2016). She was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University for 2018-2019. She lives is Kansas City, Missouri.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780141990859
ISBN 10	0141990856
Title	The Undying
Author	Anne Boyer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2020-09-08
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.