Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

Product 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).\nLike a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.\nPop 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. \nPop 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.\nPop 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.\n"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
Review
A Time Best Book of the YearAn NPR Best Book of the YearA BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the YearA Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the YearOne of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of the YearA Paperback Paris Most Anticipated Book
"Larissa Pham combines the thrilling and agonized travails of her young narrator with the lucid and steady eye of a born critic. The combination is a compelling portrait of one artist's development through the mirrors of her (and many of my) favorite artists.
Pop Song is a bold and promising debut." —Melissa Febos \n"Pham’s debut book is a brave, shrewd work of artistic and cultural criticism, exploring the ways we filter raw love and heartbreak through our encounters with music, art and other experiences, for better and for worse." —
The New York Times Book Review\n"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\n"
Pop Song is a book many will cherish for not only its articulation of pain but also its commitment to everything that comes after trauma, which is grinding, painstaking growth. . . . [Pham's] eye is voracious." —Chalay Chalermkraivuth,
The Nation\n"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\n"Artist and lit world phenom Larissa Pham’s debut essay collection is like a literary mixtape, which makes its title all the more apt. In her pieces about travel, sex, loss, and inner work, Pham builds a magpie-like nest out of cultural references . . . a volume that feels comfortingly worn-in and relatably restless." —Keely Weiss,
Harper's Bazaar\n"A