We Radiant Things cover art

We Radiant Things

On Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

We Radiant Things

By: Franny Choi
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £12.99

Pre-order Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 Part lyric memoir and part cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores pop culture’s obsession with robots and what media representation of Asian femmes reveals about race, gender, disability, language, labor, and technology. Kyoko from Ex Machina. Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. Sonmi-45 from Cloud Atlas. Cultural representations of the future of humanity are peppered with cyborgs and robots bearing the faces of East Asian women. Why is it that whenever intelligent machines and alien others are the topic of conversation, East Asian women are caught in the frame? In this lyrical, deeply felt collection, Franny Choi looks everywhere—from film and television to art exhibitions, from the history of AI to memories of growing up as the child of Korean immigrants in the American South—to understand how, like robots, the bodies of Asian American women have been seen as disposable, servile, unfeeling. Asian femmes, too, have been made into sexualized workhorses that flirt with—but never quite touch—the category of human being. It is no wonder, then, as we venture into unchartered territory, that it is up to racialized, feminized beings to lead the way. Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Asian American studies, queer and feminist theory, disability studies and literary criticism—We Radiant Things: On Being Alien and Becoming Cyborgs paints a vision for Asian American feminist imagination and survival. Literary History & Criticism United States World Literature
No reviews yet