We Radiant Things

Poetic, provocative, and defiantly unconventional." — Kirkus Reviews “We Radiant Things is a continuation and expansion of what I like to refer to as the Franny Choi Expanded Universe, where things beyond the visible horizon are seen and pulled down for a reader to touch. Everything is interconnected: popular culture, technology, grief, pleasure. I most love this book for how it transforms an oftentimes displeasing world and offers new possibilities for seeing.” — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year “In We Radiant Things, Franny Choi takes the techno-Orientalist fantasy of the Asian femme robot and turns it over with tender ambivalence before unsheathing her laser critical intelligence. Deftly moving between memoir and cultural criticism, Choi dismantles science-fictional visions of the future to reveal the ancient circuitry of race, sexuality, and labor. We Radiant Things is criticism at its most intimate and alive. I am grateful for this book.” — Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings “Franny Choi presents a kind of pageant in these essays, pictures of a life lived amid pop culture’s projections of robots presented as Asian women, or Asian women presented as robotic. Choi walks through the mirror and looks back at us, asking: What if what really threatens us isn’t AI or the algorithm? What if it might be very, very human? Funny, brilliant, and bold, Choi expands our sense of the human each time in this essay collection that is also a resuscitation. Finishing these, I felt differently alive.” — Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “A stunning achievement. Choi's essays about robots, identity, race, selfhood, and gender both illuminate and transcend their ostensible subject—what the artificial reveals about the real—while approaching something larger and more tender: how to live in such a reality. This is one of the most humane books I’ve ever read.” — Melissa Febos, national bestselling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season “We Radiant Things both plumbs deep into the painful crevasses, and also skids along the equally painful shallower glides, between Asianness and objecthood, dropping into these navigations moments of Choi’s diasporic Korean life or entangled histories of industry, gender, labor, race, migration, and the U.S. empire. Published near the emergence of AI, this book puts the lie to the stubborn idea that the differential between human and nonhuman is only just now being challenged, and instead expands our senses of boundary words like artificial, cyborg, worker, and machine. Because, Choi reflects, “[t]he Terminator is about as fluent as a textbook; about as my father.” What a loving and, to me, relieving attention to Asian American alienations from the living real and to all those who, willingly or not, occupy such spaces.” — Mel Y. Chen, author of Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire and Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect