AIRLESS SPACES by Shulamith Firestone

AIRLESS SPACES Shulamith Firestone $8 | paper | 160 pp. Semiotext(e) ISBN: 1570270821 Fiction. Refusing a career as a professional feminist, Shulamith Firestone (author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution) found herself in an "airless space"—approximately since the publication of her first book THE DIALECTIC OF SEX. This is her collection of very short tales about losers in and out of (mostly mental) hospitals and the small crises which trigger their awareness that they're in trouble. These are deadpan, deadend stories, culminating in "Obits" and "Suicides I Have Known." "In the century I'm most familiar with, the 20th, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider's tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to shut the door."—Eileen Myles