A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.
A manifesto in defense of polyamory.
Readers who hate their jobs and have reservations about capitalism will sympathize with the perspective in this collection of essays. Melbourne-based writer Olds began these pieces on an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Her main interest was in “post-work polyamory,” an idea that’s “premised on and committed to anti-capitalism” and seeks to “abolish the need to work within exploited waged (and unwaged) relations in order to survive.” In the introduction to this U.S. edition, the author writes “about how people get money (an incomplete list from the book: cryptocurrency, sex work, welfare, property, arts grants, café jobs, truck driving).” After a brief history of polyamorous groups and her attempts at polyamorous relationships, Olds presents a manifesto for post-work polyamory, which she describes as “building anti-capitalist strategies into the ongoing practice of equitably distributing labor within relationships”; relates the founding in 19th-century London of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and similar clubs that “insulated workers from the worst excesses of capitalist modernity” (and documents her visit to one such club); expounds on the hybrid essay form, “both a memoir and a review”; and details the allure of cryptocurrency. Sometimes, the author tries too hard to sound academic—as in writing that polyamory is “the dissemination of reproductive labor into a technocapitalist infrastructure”; “polyamory often tries to banalify itself.” Fortunately, much of the writing isn’t that stuffy, and Olds has a talent for well-phrased witticisms, as when she says that Michel de Montaigne, thought to have originated the hybrid form, “retired from public life to a tower in his family’s castle in Bordeaux (like all good freelancers, Montaigne worked from home)”; or when she writes of a crypto dabbler who writes poetry while working at a brothel: “Guess which one earns them a living?”
A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565714
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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