Joanna Walsh

What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl. Girl Online is an (anti)user manifesto exploring the terms and conditions that women must negotiate to appear on the internet. On commercial platforms, vloggers, bloggers and influencers are offered a devil’s bargain: visibility on the condition they present as eternally youthful, cute, and responsibility-free, paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal experience. In this way, a user is what is used. How does one woman negotiate the (cyber)space between her identities as worker, mother, artist, and fluid, commodified online persona? How does her hidden care work, as well as professional and emotional labour, play out online? Are the platforms offered by social media a trap or an opportunity for survival, creativity, and resistance? In this arresting personal narrative, Joanna Walsh constructs a philosophical investigation into the constraints and possibilities of the technological self, exploring thoughts on technology, identity, and labour. Taking in selfies, social media, celebrity, and Cyberfeminism, Girl Online is written in a shimmering array of online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary to tweets and lyric prose. Navigating its way via Sex and the City, Plato’s Symposium, and the rise of the first persona industrial complex, it is a user manual for women as the users and used of the net.

A User Guide

Girl Online

Wry, alien, and intimate, the linked stories in Vertigo take us-with lucid precision-into the negative space of the everyday.

Vertigo

My Life As a Godard Movie

A novel in essays that locates a “romance” within the mesh of electronic communication. 

"So I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. All avatars give different information, illusions of contact called Telepresence, none of them the real thing. You texted me, 3 am, from some station … As though it made any difference. But it did." from Break.up 

In this “novel in essays,” Joanna Walsh simultaneously flees and pursues an ambiguous partner in an affair conducted mostly online. Traversing Europe, she awaits emails and texts and PMs, awash in her dreams, offering succinct meditations on connection and communication. If Marguerite Duras situated the telephone as the twentieth century's preferred hopeless form of connection, Walsh pinpoints the nodal points of a “romance” within today's mesh of electronic communication. As Deborah Levy observed recently, “Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.” Her 2015 book Hotel, an investigation of transience conducted through hotel reviews, was described by The Paris Review as “a slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desires. [Walsh is] funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish places.”

“Walsh's writing has intellectual rigor and bags of formal bravery.” —The Financial Times 

“Hotel feels like something you want to endlessly quote: sharp, knowing, casually erudite … there is power and an affecting gravitas in what Walsh does with detail.” —Sydney Review of Books 

“Walsh is a sublimely elegant writer … artful and intelligent.” —The New Statesman

A Novel in Essays

Break.up

A lyrical, inventive, and witty look at the ways in which the hotel is the necessary complement, the flip side, of home, and how the alienated state of being in a hotel can be a welcome alternative to the demands of the hyper-connected, instantly personal modern world.

Hotel

Naja Marie Aidt

Christina Hesselholdt

Olivia Sudjic

Enrique Vila-Matas

Jakuta Alikavazovic

Vi Khi Nao

Jeaan-Baptiste del Amo

Mara Coson

Tools for Extinction

An imagination bomb in the library of literature--Walsh's playful and iconoclastic shorts bring a sharpness to the fiction of ideas.

Worlds from the Word's End

The internet has collapsed the boundaries of time, space, and desire. However far apart lovers are, they can instantly be present. So can they ever really break up? This is the question Walsh's narrator must reckon with as she travels across Europe after the end of a love affair conducted largely online. This pilgrimage through 'offline' space dictated by chance - on railways, on buses, on planes and, above all, on foot - wrestles with the dangers of converting longing into language, and reclaims and reshapes the territory of the male travel writer by creating personal and innovative maps of cities by which Walsh navigates the complexities of modern love. This is a work about borders - between places, people, genres - and how we might cross them. Challenging the divisions between intellect and intimacy, Walsh blends the personal and the critical to tell a mystery story about her own reality. But Break.up also challenges the borders between fiction and non-fiction, ranging widely into eclectic essays on music, boredom, shame, photography, marriage, art. From Rome to Budapest, Freud to Foucault, algorithms to nostalgia, this is a stimulating, original work which dismantles what we know of love, and how we make art from it, and finds a new form and language for the way we love now.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy...hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The Biggest Kiss

Seed

Once upon a time three big dicks lived in a forest. Meanwhile, in a city where no one has genitals, residents get creative with their desires. A woman discovers that she can cause people to have orgasms by pressing a special key on her keyboard. Joanna Walsh's interlinked fairytales take place in a realm of erotic possibility, where desire is the driving energy and shame seems to be unheard-of substance. In these funny, absurd, sometimes dark tales, everything is imbued with the magic of sex.

Grow a Pair

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Yukiko Motoya

Mathias Énard

Samanta Schweblin

Brad Watson

Susanna Alakoski

Lars Berge

Elin Cullhed

Åke Smedberg

Eivind Hofstad Evjemo

Dimitris Alevras

Ida Therén

Julia Stenroth

Rachel Shichor

I Granta #7 om service gör nya och etablerade författare en översyn av ett ord som väcker känslor och skapar debatt. Lars Berge ringer till bredbandssupporten och granskar servicesamhället, debutanten Julia Stenroth skildrar det monotona arbetet på en svinfarm och Dimitris Alevras berättar om en nybliven nattklubbschef omgiven av spritfläckar och minnen. Ida Therén ritar upp June Mansfield Millers liv och Susanna Alakoski beskriver sjukvårdsupplysningens tjänster. Åke Smedberg skriver om komplexa relationer i en trött småstad och så undersöker Elin Cullhed maktbalansen i ett familjehem. Ur internationella Granta kommer bland annat en berättelse om ett butiksbiträde som gör allt för sin kund, en novell om en dubbelarbetande mamma och en historia om dödshjälp. Svenska Granta är del av ett internationellt nätverk med engelskspråkiga Granta som nav. Tidskriften grundades av studenter i Cambridge i slutet av 1800-talet. År 1979 fick den sin nuvarande form som en arena för nyskriven skönlitteratur och litterära reportage. I dag finns Grantaredaktioner i ett tiotal länder världen över, från Kina till Brasilien. www.albertbonniersforlag.se/granta Twitter/Instagram: GrantaSweden

Granta #7 : Service

Chloe Aridjis

Viola di Grado

Susana Moreira Marques

Saleh Addonia

Xialou Guo

Vanni Bianconi

Zinovy Zinik

Wolfgang Lehrner

London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.

A Guide to the Adopted City

Lucifer Over London

John Cunliffe

Ness Wood

A Lift-the-Flap Book

Postman Pat in Greendale

A dinosaur father and child share their day, from morning yawns to fantastic bedtime stories, in a celebration of the many wonderful things about fathers.

I Love Dad

Hug in a Box

Wellcome Collection

Wellcome Trust (London, England)

The Art of Dying by Joanna Walsh : what is a Good Death Now? : 2-20 March

Ars Moriendi

A cute little dinosaur has a wonderful day playing, cycling and cooking with his Dad. They make card houses, tell stories and go for walks in the park. And at night, snuggled up in bed, the little dinosaur is excited to think about all the things he will do with his dad tomorrow. Affectionate, funny and joyful - the perfect book for little ones and their dads to share.

Pedro the donkey is sad and he needs your help. Can you save him? Maybe the fairy can. Perhaps it is the monkey. Or will it be too late? Find out in this delightful tale about a donkey who finds a new path to follow. Pedro the Donkey is a story which helps people to understand that you can choose to see and focus on all of the good, happy, positive, beautiful things in life or you can choose to be sad and focus on the negative things. All of life is a choice and by maintaining a positive aspect we can choose how we experience things. We see this demonstrated by two characters, walking the same path, yet having two completely different experiences, based on their own personal perspective on life.

Pedro the Donkey

Joanna Walsh

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