Shulamith Firestone's visionary first book The Dialectic of Sex dared to look at how feminism could shape the future. Finding herself drifting into a new 'airless space' after her experience of New York City radical feminist groups, Firestone wrote her first work of fiction.

Airless Spaces portrays the psychic suffering, bureaucratized poverty and small crises of everyday life. In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness.

Reviews

'A prophetic book with enormous consequences, since the airless spaces multiply now and begin to take over.' - Kate Millet

'In the century I'm most familiar with, the twentieth, 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

'Betty Friedan proposed letting someone else make the bread; Firestone imagines a new society. . . With a name like Shulamith Firestone, how could you not change the world?' - Joanna Biggs

Book Information
ISBN 9781739371784
Author Shulamith Firestone
Format Paperback
Imprint Silver Press
Publisher Silver Press