Airless Spaces (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Firestone, Shulamith

ISBN 10: 1570270821 / ISBN 13: 9781570270826

Published by Semiotexte, 1998

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read but remains in clean condition. All of the pages are intact and the cover is intact and the spine may show signs of wear. The book may have minor markings which are not specifically mentioned.

Seller Inventory # wbs9478803177

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Airless Spaces (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
• Publisher: Semiotexte
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570270821
• ISBN 13: 9781570270826
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 150 grams

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of short stories, set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, about characters who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty.

In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, Shulamith Firestone wrote and published The Dialectic of Sex, immediately becoming a classic of second wave feminism across the world to this very day. It was one of the few books that dared to look at how radical feminism could and should shape the future; and one whose predictions (the cybernetic revolution, for example) proved startlingly prescient of issues today. Published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces, Firestone's first work of fiction, is a collection of short stories written by Firestone as she found herself drifting from the professional career path she'd been on and into what she describes as a new "airless space." These deadpan stories, set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, are about losers who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty and find themselves in an out of (mental) hospitals. But what gives characters such as SCUM-Manifesto author Valerie Solanas their depth and charge, is their the small crises that trigger an awareness that they're in trouble. Some time later, after I had moved to St. Mark's Place, I saw Valerie in the street. She asked me for a quarter, and I saw that she was begging. She had lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. Later, a friend of mine who ran a store on St. Mark's Place said that Valerie had approached him for shelter. She was covered with sores, and wearing only a blanket to beg in. She had been out on the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, she disappeared from the street entirely.

About the Author

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.