Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection--unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the I in both literary and daily life: The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.

Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise.--Make Magazine

... smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal, ' like the panopticon eye of a camera.--The Rumpus

... the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node.--Gently Read Literature