Identity politics has been a smear for decades. The right use it to lament the loss of free speech, while many on the left bemoan it as the end of class politics. It has been used to dismiss movements such as Black Lives Matter and brought seemingly progressive people into the path of fascism. It has emboldened the march of the transphobes. In Fractured, the authors move away from the ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate. Instead of crudely categorising race, gender and sexuality as fixed and immutable identities, or forcing them under the banner of 'diversity', they argue that these categories are inseparable from the history of class struggle under British and US capitalism. Through an appraisal of pivotal historical moments in Britain and the US, including Black feminist and anticolonial traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors question the assumptions of the culture war, offering a refreshing and reasoned way to understand how historical class struggles were formed and continue to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world.

Identity politics has been a smear for decades. The right use it to lament the loss of free speech, while many on the left bemoan it as the end of class politics. It has been used to dismiss movements such as Black Lives Matter and brought seemingly progressive people into the path of fascism. It has emboldened the march of the transphobes. In Fractured, the authors move away from the ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate. Instead of crudely categorising race, gender and sexuality as fixed and immutable identities, or forcing them under the banner of 'diversity', they argue that these categories are inseparable from the history of class struggle under British and US capitalism. Through an appraisal of pivotal historical moments in Britain and the US, including Black feminist and anticolonial traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors question the assumptions of the culture war, offering a refreshing and reasoned way to understand how historical class struggles were formed and continue to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world.

Description

Sisyphusa is an allegory of depression and the mental health system as seen through the eyes of its main character and first person narrator, Odis Winston. Odis is abducted from a comfortable existence at university and taken to an institution called 'Sisyphusa'. He is told when he arrives that he is 'Weird' and that he cannot leave until he has been 'Normalised'. He has been fitted with an Earpiece which has a poisonous and malign voice, similar to his own, and which begins to torment his every waking moment. Encountering characters and situations loosely based on Homer's Odyssey and in a dystopian style influenced by Orwell and Kafka, we follow Odis's transformation from helpless captive to active rebel and leader. The book is imbued with dark humour and compassion for its characters and their struggles. It manages to be a satirical polemic of our own times while creating an entirely new world of "Aspirati," "Hysteria-Dominated Television (HDTV)," "I-Spy's," and "Climbing Pills." It explores Mental Health themes surrounding institutionalisation, dehumanisation, self-harm, stigma, suicide and media (mis)representation.

About the Author

Michael was born in London in 1986. He had a happy childhood, growing up in a loving home with his parents and older brother. He always liked school but was equally occupied with enjoying life with his friends and family and continuing his lifelong romance with Arsenal Football Club. After A-Levels, Michael travelled around India, Southeast Asia and Australasia for 6 months before attending the University of Sussex. He felt in his element being at university and living in Brighton. He was growing, working hard and making wonderful friendships.

However, halfway through his second year of university, in February 2007, he had a very sudden and unexpected onset of what was later diagnosed as Anxiety and Clinical Depression and later still with a form of OCD. Within the space of a week he went from being a very confident and successful student to being unable to leave the house that he was living in with friends in Brighton. Michael had to move back home to hisparents' house in London where he has remained ever since.

He has had various talking therapies and medications over the four years he has been unwell, some of which have been very helpful, others distinctly unhelpful. He began to read avidly after the first year of almost catatonic depression. He has also tried to learn Spanish and Portuguese and has taken up the piano. He wrote Sisyphusa over the course of around eighteen months initially inspired by a strange dream and by the anger he felt after attending a psychiatric day hospital for six months.

Michael has felt a stark rupture in the way in which he has experienced life before and after his breakdown. He is no longer as housebound as he was in the first couple of years, thanks in large part to his Cocker Spaniel puppy Milo who demands constant walks and attention. He has fewer crises, and with the help of his family and caregivers he has learned more effective ways of managing his symptoms. Nevertheless, his situation remains very limited as hefeels unable to work or to resume his formal studies, nor does he feel able to be in contact with former friends from school and university or most of his wider family.But he's pleased to be able to share his work with a wider audience and to add his voice to the many thousands fighting against the stigma surrounding mental illness.

All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila's sister--until the day Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered, and the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years later, Ellie is a professional coffee buyer who has never put down roots. When, in a chance meeting, she comes into possession of the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, Ellie returns home to finally discover the truth about her sister's death--a search that will lead her to Lila's secret lover, to the motives and fate of a man who profited from their family's grief, and ultimately to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. From the bestselling author of The Year of Fog" "("Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard."--"Library Journal" [starred review]), this is a riveting family drama about loss, love, and the way hope redefines our lives--a novel at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.

Winner of the fC2 Catherine doctorow innovative fiction Prize. A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation. Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles. In "Hum," a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes "quietly lost to each other," as the wife's infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. In "Medicine," a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In "Boulevard," a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. "Scales," the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of "Lake" must choose whether to walk in the foot- steps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.