Airless Spaces

Price: 24.95 AUD

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In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, Shulamith Firestone wrote andpublished The Dialectic of Sex, immediately becoming a classic of second wavefeminism across the world to this very day. It was one of the few books that daredto look at how radical feminism could and should shape the future; and one whosepredictions (the cybernetic revolution, for example) proved startlingly prescient ofissues today.Published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces, Firestone's firstwork of fiction, is a collection of short stories written by Firestone as she foundherself drifting from the professional career path she'd been on and into what shedescribes as a new "airless space." These deadpan stories, set among the disappearedand darkened sectors of New York City, are about losers who fall prey to anincreasingly bureaucratized poverty and find themselves in an out of (mental)hospitals. But what gives characters such as SCUM-Manifesto author Valerie Solanastheir depth and charge, is their the small crises that trigger an awareness thatthey're in trouble.Some time later, after I had moved to St. Mark's Place, I sawValerie 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 whoran 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 outon the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, shedisappeared from the street entirely.