Swimming Upside Down
$29.75
- Paperback
240 pages
- Release Date
15 June 2027
Summary
Winner of the 2025 Sarabande Prize in the Essay, selected by Leslie Jamison
Swimming Upside Down by the late Karen Kao, a writer Maggie Nelson described as having “great rhythm and propulsion,” is a sharp-edged and sober account of a life deeply lived.
In her posthumous publication, Swimming Upside Down, Karen Kao reflects on a woman who, faced with a terminal diagnosis, must come to terms with her mortality and the fact that “She won’t be a patient forever.”…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781956046731 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1956046739 |
| Author: | Karen Kao |
| Publisher: | Sarabande Books, Incorporated |
| Imprint: | Sarabande Books, Incorporated |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 240 |
| Release Date: | 15 June 2027 |
| Dimensions: | 133mm x 196mm |
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Critics Review
PRAISE FOR SWIMMING UPSIDE DOWN
“[T]his book is utterly, unstoppably alive: embodied and unsentimental, blunt and bare-faced, messy and hungry. This is a book about loving the world and being injured by it, grasping at beauty with fingertips stained yellow by nicotine, leaning against the ones we love but also probing the wounds they’ve given us. It’s a book full of recklessness, desire, and the hard-won succor of seeing others in their full humanity–and then, always, casting that rigorous gaze back at the self. I’m grateful for the pivots and edges of this book, its style and its range–but most of all, for the oxygen of its honesty” -Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
PRAISE FOR KAREN KAO
”[The essay] has great rhythm and propulsion. It’s pretty then gross then sad then worrying then exciting. It slips in and out of weird synecdoche, swerves with grace between divergent forms of address. It treads on cultural fault lines, familial discord, sensory experience, the move from childhood to adulthood, without wasting time explaining. I’d read a book of it.” -Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets, in praise of “Fish Tales”
Karen Kao
Karen Kao (1959-2025) was a novelist, essayist, and writer of short fiction and poetry. Her collection Swimming Upside Down (Sarabande, 2027) was selected by Leslie Jamison as the winner of the Sarabande Prize in the Essay. Her Substack of the same name is an ongoing archive of her work. She is the author of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle (Linen Press, 2017), and her work has appeared in Pleiades, The Common, Brevity Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and the Shanghai Literary Review, among others. Her work was selected by Maggie Nelson to win the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, was included as a 2024 Notable in The Best American Essays, and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. The SweetLit Flash Fiction Contest will be renamed the Karen Kao Creative Nonfiction Flash Essay Prize in her honor. She was born in Los Angeles, CA, and lived with her husband in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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