About the Book
Professor and punk musician G'Ra Asim claps back at chronic lovelessness in the post-covid era with heft and whimsy-and a template for a more intimate, interpersonal future
In 2004, Jay-Z released his instant classic "99 Problems," which details the many problems in his life, expect romantic love. Fast forward over 20 years, G'Ra Asim is facing his own set of problems, except they all focus on modern romance.
Contemplating his singledom and mishaps in dating, Asim takes us through a thoughtful meditation on chronic lovelessness. Using a process he calls "thinkful wishing" as an antidote, Asim scopes out modern love, romance, and ambivalence to manifest a more loving and lovable future. Or at least someone he can list as his emergency contact.
99 Problems Finding the 1 offers cultural critique, contemplation, and experience from a millennial in search of a partner. For example, Asim observes how ascendant Black folks rarely reach "cruising altitude"-a professional plateau stable enough to focus one's overtaxed attention on vetting potential partners. On tour with his band, he ponders the relationship between stage banter and the seedy underbelly of social awkwardness.
His bold dissection of modernity serves a central claim: admittedly a problematic fave, love is worthy and capable of reclamation and redemption. Even as white supremacy gets in the way, Asim argues that we'll have to abandon the posture of terminal cool and hazard a little earnestness to bring love back.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
A Substitution off the Bench
Conduct Detrimental to the Meme
Longing for the Crooked Crown
The Jig Is Up and Down
Putting the Fun in Fungibility
Motion Capture
Screen-Time Report
Shtick Shift
Trickle-Down Exceptionalism
Six Degrees of Derogation
Exercises in (Attachment) Style
More Sugar. Less Meshuggah.
On Having Low Job Satisfaction
Riffs, Ands, or Buts About It
Gluttonous Punishment
Pedagogy of the Compressed
Would You Still Love Me If I Was a [Book] Worm?
Power Shadow and Act
Present Company Accepted
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author :
G'Ra Asim is a writer, a musician, and assistant professor of creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. His debut nonfiction book, Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends memoir, cultural criticism and personal essays framed as letters to his younger brother, exploring blackness, masculinity and punk culture. The book was named one of the best nonfiction titles of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews. Asim's writing has appeared in publications like Slate, Salon, Guernica, The New Republic and The Boston Globe. He previously served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and a graduate teaching fellow at Columbia University. As a musician, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for the DIY pop punk band Baby Got Back Talk, recognized by Alternative Press as one of "rising Black alternative bands" and by Idobi as one of "100 Rising Artists to Listen to." Their full-length debut, Genre Reveal Party, was named one of 500 Essential Pop Punk Albums by Ruffian Books.
Review :
“[An] astute essay collection . . . Simultaneously personal and relatable, this deserves a wide readership.”
—Publishers Weekly
“99 Problems Finding the 1 is a tour de force . . . a kaleidoscopic descent into love’s endless labyrinths and one of the smartest portraits of loving while Black put to page.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of This Is How You Lose Her
“99 Problems Finding the 1 is a story—confessional, analytical, serious, and witty—about all kinds of love. . . . Asim writes with exhilarating intelligence and gusto.”
—Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System
“A trenchantly wise and wisecracking how-to manual for maintenance of the human heart in the face of bleak indifference and ruthlessly organized hatreds.”
—Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief of The Nation and contributing editor at The Baffler
“There is more pleasure, hope, humanity, and intertextual intelligence in a single G’Ra Asim sentence than in most books. With the open-hearted vision of Laymon, the kinetic connection-forging of Crenshaw, and the playful post-punk earnestness he’s known for in his songs, Asim casts us as companions on a quest for love—not just with a romantic partner but with the world.”
—Eleanor Henderson, author of Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage
“99 Problems Finding the 1 is the best book about love I’ve read in years. It’s the 1, you might say, because, like a great relationship, it takes itself both very seriously and with a mischievous, what-are-we-doing-here wink. That combination is irresistible.”
—Benoit Denizet-Lewis, New York Times Magazine contributing writer and author of You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation
“A virtuoso performance by a writer at the top of his game. Asim has written a timely manifesto on romantic love that will define a generation. Easily among the best books I’ve read in years.”
—Jerald Walker, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
“Reading this book is like sitting down with one of your coolest and smartest friends as they unspool tales of love and loss, as they interrogate attitudes toward Blackness and gender roles, as they make you laugh out loud.”
—Daniel A. Hoyt, author of Shit List and This Book Is Not for You
“G’Ra Asim turns his wide-ranging poetic sensibility toward the search for true love in the twenty-first century. At the same time, he holds up and honors his own models for love’s possibilities in the lives of his twentieth-century grandparents and parents. This book both astutely signifies on contemporary culture and also dreams of a future with enough room for the tried and true. Since Asim’s first love is probably language, the book is a joy to read, riffing and spinning off the pleasures of the word, reveling in the philosophical questions he finds in everyday interactions, from the wilds of the dating world to the halls of academe.
Asim frames his quest for love against the historical, political, and social backdrops that shape our lives, always keeping track of the way ‘the behavior of the state at the macro level shapes the choreography of desire at the micro level.’ Summing up the difficulties of one particular relationship, Asim writes, ‘The entire imbroglio was somehow personal and structural at the same time.’ This line also neatly addresses why 99 Problems is so much more than a memoir. Asim’s deft and nuanced depiction of this combination of the personal and the structural is what makes this book so readable and so smart.”
—Wendy W. Walters, author of Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading Between Literature and History
“In this social media present, where we find ourselves increasingly subject to the ephemeral whims and weaponized polarity of The Discourse™, 99 Problems Finding the 1 serves up a nutritional nuance our internet-heavy idea diets so desperately lack. It’s no wonder that Asim’s punk-rock sensibilities render so colorfully on the page; these essay-notes clang with abandon against the brick walls of identity spaces that seem Black-and-white, making room instead for inquisitive expansion, seemingly oxymoronic human truths, and complex (non)conclusions that press insistently—beautifully—against the decisive finality our minds have been trained to crave and accept as ‘reality.’ Unafraid to eschew norms and walk funky, and armed with a whip-smart arsenal of vernacular language (I dare any reader not to laugh aloud at the original portmanteau swirlboss), Asim presents a vision of love—grounded, humorous, and, perhaps most importantly, aspirational—one need not be a romantic to fall for.”
—Ariana Benson, author of Black Pastoral, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize
“G’Ra Asim’s voice isn’t like anyone else’s: wry, tender, punk, hopeful, playful, and precise. Surrendering to the rhythms of his thinking feels a bit like heading up to a treehouse hideaway with a good friend, an old radio, and a sleeve of graham crackers, ready to tune into a station playing strange, ecstatic, heartbroken songs that haven’t yet been written. He’s interested in the self as a manually operated vehicle, inviting us to shtick-shift between various gears of longing and being; he’s interested in bringing exploded-rocket curiosity into the heart-space; he’s interested in Manifest Destiny’s Child and the talisman of an NBA sixth man; he’s interested in sonic umami and himself incapable of not serving it up—he’s alive to those dense, frictional moments between human beings in which something interesting becomes visible. He plays close, keen attention to the world and gives it back to us newly strange and alive. I plan to keep happily reading everything he writes for the rest of my days.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
