In Health and Safety, Emily Witt turns from personal freedom, drugs, sex, nightlife and subculture toward parenthood, climate dread, politics, money, public life, private exhaustion, and make them stare each other in the eye.

Moving through Brooklyn literary scenes, dance floors, protest politics, family life and the pandemic years, Witt writes with the cool of someone watching the party lights come on at 6am and realising the building is structurally unsound. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part field report from the recent American present, this is a book about what happens when the old promises of pleasure, independence and self-invention hit harder limits: bodies, children, rent, violence, illness, ageing, responsibility, the state. Witt is good on the romance of freedom and even better on its invoices.

First edition hardback, published by Pantheon Books in 2024. Very good condition overall, with light shelf wear to jacket and edges only; internally clean and sound.