Frankfurt Gaming Nights Blur Desire and Identity
Gaming, Frankfurt and desire give this novel an offbeat, unsettled atmosphere. Polly Barton explores dislocation and reinvention, especially the strange temptation to vanish from the version of yourself others recognise. The strangeness feels intimate rather than decorative.
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What Am I, a Deer?
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Frankfurt Gaming Nights Blur Desire and Identity
Gaming, Frankfurt and desire give this novel an offbeat, unsettled atmosphere. Polly Barton explores dislocation and reinvention, especially the strange temptation to vanish from the version of yourself others recognise. The strangeness feels intimate rather than decorative.
- Book Synopsis
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What does it mean to lose yourself - and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention.
On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession - not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace.
With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny.
Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication.
Ideal for readers who:
- Seek offbeat literary fiction about obsession, reinvention and losing yourself.
- Appreciate narrators who are funny, self-conscious and slightly unravelled.
- Follow Frankfurt, gaming culture and karaoke as strange emotional landscapes.
- Prefer contemporary novels where identity feels unstable, intimate and darkly comic.
- About The Author
- Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds, for which she won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and Porn: An Oral History. What Am I, A Deer? is her debut novel.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781804272176
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Fitzcarraldo Editions, (26 March 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 248
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 197 x 125 mm
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