Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
It felt almost subversive, reading Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family in my little hetero-family-centric enclave of east Bristol with my newborn in tow. In the coffee shops I frequent or the children’s library sessions I attend, the very sight of me with this book may very well have ensured that I am banished from future play dates or baby yoga sessions. Lewis, picking up where she left off with her previous book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), acknowledges as much in... [read more]
A constantly shifting constellation of voices, Amnion travels through space and time at dizzying speed in a startlingly complex, dense, and personal exploration of identity and heritage. If one were forced to summarise this twisting kaleidoscope of a publication, it could be described roughly as Stephanie Sy-Quia’s scrapbook of memories, anecdotes, and reflections, charting her family’s history across continents on a journey of self-discovery — but, of course, this would hardly do justice... [read more]
Philippa Snow, Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment
reviewed by Katherine Franco
If you walked into the storefront at 3 Mercer Street on 29 November 1975, you would have received a glass of wine from the artist Lil Picard. You would then have been encouraged to spit this wine on writer Kathy Acker’s naked body. The activity goes by the name of Tasting & Spitting, a performance piece by Picard and starring Acker in Lower Manhattan.
Acker is, of course, pissed at Picard by the performance’s end: for appropriating Acker’s moniker the ‘Black Tarantula’ within the... [read more]
Luke Savage, The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History
reviewed by Luke Warde
Luke Savage begins the first essay of The Dead Center, ‘Liberalism in Theory and Practice’, by describing his first ‘formative’ political memory: the evening of November 4th, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Given who he was and what he represented, this was in itself an event of colossal historical importance. Yet much of Obama’s true significance lay not in what he had just achieved, unprecedented as this was, but in what he promised: a better,... [read more]
Edward F. Fischer, Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value
reviewed by Sean Russell
When I worked as a barista I found there were two types of customer. The ones that bemoaned the price of the coffee as too expensive, and those who were happy to pay extra, seeing it as benefitting those who farmed the beans in faraway and exotic places. Well, good coffee should be expensive, but the truth is that most of the profits — even of so-called third-wave artisan coffee — still remain in the place of consumption, not production. Meanwhile, the farmers, while undoubtedly doing... [read more]
Marguerite Duras, trans. Emma Ramadan & Olivia Baes, The Easy Life
reviewed by Daisy Sainsbury
Published in 1944 when the author was 30, The Easy Life was Marguerite Duras’s second novel. Thanks to co-translators Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, it is now appearing in English for the first time, nearly 80 years later. Very few of Duras’s works have remained untranslated for so long, which poses the obvious question of why. Was the delay simply a product of happenstance? Or is this early novel not very good? The answer, I suspect, is somewhere between the two. Set on an isolated... [read more]
In his 1952 disquisition on the experience of blackness, Black Skin, White Masks, the French-Martinique philosopher Frantz Fanon asserts the equality of all men before recounting his experience of an encounter with a white family. Fanon writes that, among black friends and family, his blackness was unremarkable, but this changes under the racialising gaze of empire: ‘the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me.’ It is this unfamiliar weight... [read more]
To read about Vladimir Sorokin is to be inundated with suppositions about real-world analogues. Who or what was the inspiration for this passage of remarkable scatology, violence, profanity, fascistic activity — or some amalgamation of the four? Often considered Russia’s leading contemporary novelist, Sorokin’s work has been long suppressed by the authorities of his own country. However, the rate of English translation has distorted American critics’ ideas of relevance, drilling... [read more]
Mariana Enríquez gets good book covers. For her Man Booker-nominated short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a disembodied face floats, a cigarette hanging out of one eye, a long-nailed hand curling around the other. For her latest book, Our Share of Night — her first novel published in English — that hand yawns out to fill the entire cover. It is a silhouette, the fingernails again horrifying and long, this time gold. They snag your attention well. Were they to tap at your window at... [read more]
Philip Ó Ceallaigh settled in Bucharest at the end of the 1990s, and since then most of his stories have taken place in eastern Europe. In deadbeat neighbourhoods and stifling apartment blocks, their protagonists eke out austere livings. His lauded first collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) depicts Bucharest — ‘that terrible city which wears you down’ — as itself eroded, full of corruption and decay. The crumbling blocks are ruins of the Communist era, Ceaușescu’s... [read more]
