Rachel Greenwald Smith, On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal
reviewed by Ruby Hamilton
Compromise is an often-understated term in the late Lauren Berlant’s writing about ‘cruel optimism’, defined in their words as ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’. Indeed, compromise is cruel optimism rendered as an agreement: it means accepting, even desiring, something that is, by definition, a diminished version of what you want. So why are we drawn... [read more]
Speculative fiction is a literature of ideas. Fahrenheit 451 pondered a tyranny of censorship, Neuromancer considered the lines between consciousness and computer, and The Handmaid’s Tale simulated an extraction of human rights. Speculative fiction is timely; a window with slight reflection. The genre blends what is and what could be by asking, what if? Venetia Welby’s second novel, Dreamtime, is a Zoom call to the not-so-distant future. One where the lack of human reconciliation for the... [read more]
Fiction that successfully moves between trenchant political concerns and unabated dreamlike logic and imagery is a rare thing to come across. Flann O’Brien’s works, at once madcap and tragic, come to mind; so too does Norman Lock’s fiction, which has a penchant for blending historical resonance with dream logic. And the short fiction that first put George Saunders on the map also unites politically conscious themes with frenetic imagery. Isabel Waider’s work likewise exists in a... [read more]
Selma James, Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet
reviewed by Frith Taylor
Selma James is a writer and activist who has written extensively on the interrelated issues that affect women's liberation. Her book Sex, Race and Class (1974) is regarded by many as a classic of early Marxist feminism. This new anthology of her writing begins in 1977 with the Wages for Housework campaign for which she is best known, and concludes in 2020 with James advocating a care income in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way she looks at a number of revolutionary... [read more]
There is a scene quite early in Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel Cold Earth that works as a telling moment — as a clue to the motivations of the narrator at that point, Ruth, but also, perhaps more importantly, as to the emerging and eventual moral design of Moss’s work. Ruth, along with a group of five other archaeologists, is excavating a remote Viking settlement. A parallel narrative, which gradually reveals the horrors that caused those original inhabitants to leave their homes, unseats... [read more]
Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, trans. Kristine Ong Muslim, Three Books
reviewed by Liam Bishop
Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Three Books are poems derived from source ‘texts’ written and restructured as poems. Kristine Ong Muslim, the translator of Three Books, calls the poems works of ‘systematic erasure’, and while this might sound like an overly technological, even 'hip' way to describe his craft, Arguelles asks important questions about the overlooked tactile nature of the creative process. Take the first book, ‘Antares’, where Arguelles creates a series of short... [read more]
Adam Zmith, Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures
reviewed by Charlie Pullen
Halfway through Alan Hollinghurst’s 1998 novel The Spell, a group of gay Londoners descend on a cottage in rural Dorset for a party. ‘So you’re bussing in a whole crowd of dizzy disco bunnies and letting them loose in the beautiful English countryside,’ one character remarks to the host, whose friends and casual lovers are hooked on the heady pleasures of the capital’s nightlife. ‘They may not be able to breathe the country air’, he warns: ‘You’ll need respirators of poppers... [read more]
When I first arrived in London, I made the pilgrimage to Chelsea to see the house Oscar Wilde used to live in. While I was staring at it, a lady stuck her head out the window and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was admiring Oscar Wilde’s old house, and pointed to the blue plaque that says that the ‘wit and dramatist’ used to live there. She was shocked — she had no idea she was living in such an esteemed place. She gracefully let me take a photo of the house, but I left doubting... [read more]
László F. Földényi, The Glance of the Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism
reviewed by Farah Abdessamad
What did we lose when we renounced magic? Everything, according to Hungarian critic and philosopher László F. Földényi in his new collection of essays, The Glance of the Medusa. ‘There would be no exceptional moments in life if life itself was not a unique and extraordinary moment of lightning,’ he writes.
The first time I felt the unsettling gaze of an artwork stirring my emotions I was sitting in a church. Though not steeped in religion, I wondered what kind of presence lingered... [read more]
Diana Taylor, ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence
reviewed by Isabelle Bucklow
Last year Diana Taylor, Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, published her contribution to Duke University Press’ Dissident Acts, a series on embodied politics and decolonial practices. ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence is an urgent response to systematic projects of disappearance in the Americas. Tracing the history of disappearances from the Enlightenment to the present, Taylor explores the diverse ways by which a person — to use Franz Fanon’s term — is cast into a... [read more]
