Kirjahaku

A woman meets a man and falls in love. She is sixty, a writer and lifelong New Yorker raised by garmentos. She thought this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again. He is English, so who knows what he thinks. He is fifty-six, a professor now living in Arizona, the son of a bespoke tailor. As the first of Laurie Stone’s linkedstories begins, the writer contemplates what life would be like in the desert with the professor. As we learn how she became the person she is, we also come to know the artists and politics of the downtown scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, a cultural milieu that remains alive in her. In sharply etched prose, Stone presentsa woman constantly seduced by strangers, language, the streets—even a wildlife trail. Her characters realize that they feel at home in dislocation—in always living in two places at the same time: east and west, past and present, the bed and the grave (or copper urn). Love may not last, the writer knows. Then again, when hasanything you thought about the future turned out right?

Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Stone to feel good when everything is bad. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, the pieces are constructed the way dreams and films are: juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven throughout are chunks from Stone's Facebook posts that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it's being lived."Stone is engaging, sharp, funny throughout these pages but no matter how far she ranges, she holds onto the recognition that daily life in the US is being lived under a dark cloud. She makes the stakes very clear. Her Notes on Now are completely illuminating."--Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, from the Introduction

Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated lives we carried out in private.Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist and longtime contributor to the Village Voice and NPR's Fresh Air, unapologetically observes against the backdrop of a Zoom call the evolution of feminism over the years, the gendered sexual politics underlying Jeffrey Toobin's public disgrace, rage and hope on the heels of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and the way we continue to pot and maintain our plants amidst the broken narrative of our world's future. As Stone says, It’s good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others. In a time when most of us felt more alone than ever before, Laurie Stone's Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a retroactive but no less timely reminder that we were less alone in our thoughts than we thought.