Airless Spaces, New Edition

By Shulamith Firestone

Book Overview

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

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she'd helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a "professional feminist." Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she'd trained for. She wouldn't publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1635902517
• ISBN13: 9781635902518
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A 5-star Effort (where words fail)

For those of us, who have (somehow) avoided mental institutions, Ms Firestone is our proxyguide of 'what to avoid'. The amazing thing about her writing, is its clarity within the fog enshrouded material (her one-year confinement in Bellevue). I cannot praise, sufficently, the effort contained within this slim opus. I love Shulamith Firestone!

Brilliant use of language to create "airless spaces"

Shulamith Firestone, author of the classic feminist text "Dialectic of Sex" and important early women's liberation activist in the late Sixties has turned her considerable writing skill to fiction. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every story is polished and honed to perfection like a stone rounded and smooth by water.

stark, haunting

Firestone doesn't waste words in this plain and haunting look at life in and out of mental institutions. It was a quick read -- one afternoon -- that stayed with me for many days. There is very little analysis here, no deep insight into how people become ill or wind up in the hospital; just stark, honest, sometimes brutal observations on their lives during and after they have been there. I haven't been so frightened, for myself and for others walking the fine line of sanity, since reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (a very different yet similarly evocative book) years ago.

Another gift from Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone has long been important to feminists' understanding of social institutions, injustices, and struggles. Airless Spaces adds to our understanding of an institution and experience we too often refuse to examine: hospitals for the mentally ill and mental illness itself. In a series of stark and riveting short stories, Firestone recounts the lives of those who move in and out of hospitals, rely on government, medical, and other social assistance for their survival, and fail or refuse to eke out lives recognizably "normal." As someone whose mother suffers from and has been hospitalized with bipolar disorder, I read this book as a gift. I am grateful to Shulamith Firestone for helping me to understand the lives led by my mother and those with whom she spends her days. I have a better sense now of the sorrow, humor, madness, desperation, and fantastic with which they contend daily. Too often we imagine the mentally ill as having no lives; Shulamith Firestone provides us with a picture of the difficult but nonetheless _lived_ lives of the mentally ill. This is an important and generous book.