Who Loves the Sun
by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
Paperback
168 pages
Publication date: 11/14/2023
ISBN 978-1-950987-40-5
$20 (order online)
Who Loves the Sun begins as a study of the scientific poster, in an attempt to understand the object and the people who make them. Eventually focus strays from this subject to explore how the emotional, personal, and expressive leak from all structures that attempt to contain the self, be they molecular, disciplinary, or typographic. Composed of seven chapters, each taking a different form—from email to lecture to personal essay to mourning diary— Who Loves The Sun ultimately embraces the failure of form.
Read an excerpt in Passages North.
And another excerpt in DIAGRAM.
About the Author
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. She has performed, screened, and exhibited nationally and internationally at the Electronic Literature Organization, Human Resources LA, the Brussels Independent Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Praise for Who Loves the Sun
“Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is a stunning new voice. With tenderness, she combines hybrid forms to re-narrativize her time working in a laboratory, and to think through the aesthetics of scientific posters. She reflects upon early childhood and considers ethics with a deeply lucid mind and heart. Who Loves the Sun is a rare gift, and should be required reading for anyone grappling with the tenuous task of designing their own life.” —Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts
“With gentle, tender vignettes, Fulla Abdul-Jabbar captures a soul’s education within a system of transmitted facts and its accompanying expectations of what it means to be good. Who Loves the Sun is a moving, highly original bildungsroman and thought experiment about the creation and disassembly of selfhood and desire.” — Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of The Giller Prize finalist, We Measure the Earth with our Bodies
“Fulla Abdul-Jabbar’s striking debut book, Who Loves the Sun, is a whirling and lyrical investigation into the confusing strands of intellectual discipline. Abdul-Jabbar is a keen wordsmith, who candidly builds, splices, and interweaves observations from the field, chronicled from a deeply felt first-person prose. The book becomes a document, a record, that logs the ways an educational discipline are communicated and understood, especially when the complexity of such is, by design, overbearing and confusing. Yet, as she elucidates and illuminates, this understanding can be tender, softened, and shared, when guided by words and a voice intentional and clear.” —Sky Hopinka, artist and filmmaker