There are three forms of strike I’d recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can’t wait for the first two.
The first collection of essays from Lucy Ellmann, Things Are Against Us is everything you might expect from such a fiery writer—which is to say, entirely unexpected.
Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie to Agatha Christie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rails against bras, and pleads for sanity in a world that—well, a world that spent four years in the company of Donald Trump, that ‘tremendously sick, terrible, nasty, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, zero-chance lying liar’.
Things Are Against Us is electric. It’s vital. These are essays bursting with energy. Reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times.
Author Biography:
Lucy Ellmann’s first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. Her latest, Ducks, Newburyport, was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Saltire Prize, and won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2020 James Tait Black Prize. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, Irish Times and other publications. American by birth, she now lives in Scotland.
