Among Others
Among Others interweaves the stories, sensations, and speculations of more than a dozen people — their identities lightly cloaked by pronouns rather than names. The passages move across five decades and four continents, gathering voices from tape recordings of other people’s memories as well as Kaiser's own written reflections.
Among the moments gathered here: the faces that flicker up behind closed eyelids before sleep; a little kid laying down the rules of time travel; a Bharatanatyam dancer whose hands say more than her words; the intricate idiocy of a stag night in Bucharest, charted on a napkin; jazz pianists who can’t stop singing along with their right hand, up into falsetto; arthritic Navajo women sung over on sand paintings, the sand quickly buried as if radioactive; a Marine walking point in Vietnam who steps over a booby trap that blows up the buddy behind him; a toddler's first words in Serbian, lost on the flight home; a Mexican friend who once pointed out that the world’s languages outnumber the visible stars—and are vanishing just as fast.
The passages are organized in groups of five, called quintets, with each passage linking directly (if unexpectedly) to the next. There are 55 quintets across five chapters. Photographs are scattered among the pages as occasional visual evidence, and nine full-page diagrams trace thematic threads across the entire volume.
Printed in a private edition, 2020; then revised substantially and reprinted in a compact private edition in 2026.