Overview

A haunting, poetic excavation of memory, the nocturnal imagination, and a search for new forms of language to act upon legacies of violence and erasure. Thanatographies is a genre-defying meditation on disappearance, memory, and the porous boundaries between the living and the dead. In poetic prose, Yanara Friedland weaves together dreamscapes, historical fragments, personal recollections, and philosophical inquiry to explore the afterlives of loss and survival. Moving through rooms, cities, forests, and archives, the text becomes a living document of insomnia, exile, and the spectral presence of women across time, including artists, revolutionaries, caretakers, and ghosts. Structured in four sections titled Room, Night, Medusas, and Burials, the book traverses inner and outer landscapes, from Berlin's haunted streets to the intimate terrain of the body. Friedland's voice is both lyrical and incisive, drawing on figures such as Unica Zürn, Rosa Luxemburg, and Else Lasker-Schüler to illuminate the intersections of gender, violence, and historical erasure. The result is a deeply embodied poetics of wakefulness, where hidden life remembers and speaks. Thanatographies is written for readers of experimental literature, feminist theory, and contemporary poetics. The book resonates with artists, scholars, and seekers who are compelled by the aesthetics of mourning, the politics of memory, and the radical potential of language to hold what is otherwise unspeakable.

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9781573662178

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Reviews

In this lyrical, haunting, and intelligent speculative biography, Yanara Friedland considers how the self is made and unmade by intimate and world-historical forces. Friedland writes with a poet's exquisite precision and the heady breadth of the philosopher. Her sharp, wry, incantatory prose captures women in the aftermath of minor and major betrayals, a world where writing is inextricable from living in history's cold shadows. In vivid cities, landscapes, and dreams where the restless dead still speak, Thanatographies stages vital questions about the pleasures and obligations of remembering, forgetting, and critical fabulation. --Mireille Juchau, author of The World Without Us

In this lyrical, haunting, and intelligent speculative biography, Yanara Friedland considers how the self is made and unmade by intimate and world-historical forces. Friedland writes with a poet's exquisite precision and the heady breadth of the philosopher. Her sharp, wry, incantatory prose captures women in the aftermath of minor and major betrayals, a world where writing is inextricable from living in history's cold shadows. In vivid cities, landscapes, and dreams where the restless dead still speak, Thanatographies stages vital questions about the pleasures and obligations of remembering, forgetting, and critical fabulation. —Mireille Juchau, author of The World Without Us ""Eerie, elegant, and frighteningly accomplished, Thanatographies is one of those rare books that manages to be very readable and stylistically inventive all at once."" —Susan Finlay, author of The Lives of Artists ""In Yanara Friedland's book, sleeplessness breaks the spell of ordinary time, daring to evoke a lucid and utterly unique form of expression akin to the language of prophetic dreaming. Underneath the systemic roots of intergenerational trauma and suffering, the dead, and all manner of beings – from the trees to the soil – visionary seers and tightrope walkers of the spirit – collectively carve out a parallel, liberatory world, marked by magical rites, and a surrendering to a primordial intelligence, greater than the sum of its parts."" —Dalia Neis, author of The Swarm ""In Thanatographies, there are whispers and secrets everywhere; everything is haunted by what language reaches to articulate and by mere presence: your's, her's, everyone's. To open oneself to this breathing, dreaming liminality is to open oneself to a witnessing of life's constant disappearing act. In this text, one feels they are constantly on the verge of waking up or falling asleep, of dying or being resuscitated, of finding enlightenment or dissipating into a speck of dust. ""My nunnery is a wide-open realm,"" writes Friedland; this is the kind of writing I want to touch with my whole body, the surface area of my entire being ready to absorb every glimmering word."" —Janice Lee, author of Imagine a Death

Author Information

Yanara Friedland is a writer, translator, and educator born in Berlin. She is the author of Un-country: A Mythology (2016) and Groundswell (2021). Her work explores the effects of dislocation on memory and language, engaging with multilingual and transhistorical spaces through archival research, nocturnal imagination, and collaborations with other artists.

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