Shulamith Firestone – Airless Spaces

The setting for this collection of short stories about social outsiders who feel suffocated by contemporary society is the claustrophobic environment of psychiatric institutions or secluded hideouts in New York. The author, Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012), studied art history and ranks among the most remarkable figures of the radical movements of the twentieth century. Although she was raised in a conservative Jewish family, at the young age of twenty-five she was already regarded as an intellectual star in radical circles, thanks to her book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which to this day is considered a crucial and pioneering work of the second wave of feminism. However, Firestone subsequently withdrew from the activist scene, spending her time either hospitalized in psychiatric institutions or living in seclusion. Airless Spaces is her second book, published by the Semiotext(e) press twenty-eight years after her first. This autobiographically tinged work presents a merciless and cruel analysis from the perspective of those who are unable or unwilling to function and adjust to contemporary society.