Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone
With an accompanying Reader featuring contributions by Laya Firestone Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, Chris Kraus, Lola Olufemi and Hannah Proctor.
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.
Paperback Original
Publication: 28 April 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7393717-8-4
Extent: 256 pages
£13.99
"The very short stories in Airless Spaces masterfully depict all kinds of minor atrocities that eventually lead to each person’s downfall: a forced shower, a snub, a slow-moving bureaucracy, a repurposed lounge." - Chris Kraus
“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
"Filled with loss, loneliness and failures of connection, Airless Spaces insists on taking love seriously by exploring the uneven damage inflicted by an unjust and oppressive world inimical to loving." - Hannah Proctor
“It operates like a parable—deceptively simple and stark, almost imagistic as little pieces fit together with little pieces, pretending to be about small outcast lives when in fact it is an encyclopedia of our age—a harrowing record of what really goes on among us where the wounds of life bring on the invasion of institutions which inflict still more suffering—a stifling atmosphere of isolations where souls are automatically and needlessly lost. This is a prophetic book with enormous consequences since the airless spaces multiply now and begin to take over.” - Kate Millett
"For Firestone, to live successfully as a woman under patriarchy—to submit to the unfairness of gender relations, to smilingly endure your subordinate status and the limits it places on your freedom and dignity—was itself a kind of well-adjusted madness, a trade-off wherein women gained social approval in exchange for accepting the myth of their own inferiority." - The New Yorker
"Airless Spaces [...] dramatizes what happens when capitalist alienation makes everybody miserable... a tender, compassionate, and crushingly depressing work of fiction by one of our most important feminist theorists." - The Nation
"In Airless Spaces, one is not born, but rather becomes, a patient. Mental illness is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a product of a warping institution. Firestone’s characters struggle before they are committed, yet it is the inhumanity of the hospital that ultimately cements their status as outcasts." - The Washington Post
"It jostles between depicting people at their most atomized—outside consensus reality or social contracts—and their most blurry and indistinct... While The Dialectic of Sex closes with a vision of earth as it is in heaven, Airless Spaces closes with a paranoid fixation on the hereafter that gradually dismantles Firestone’s here and now." - Harper's Magazine