Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism is a slippery, essayistic work of memoir, criticism, political longing, art writing, and self-interrogation.
It begins from a desire to escape capitalism’s dead air. Moving between New York, the Bay Area, art, family, gender, illness, romance, left politics, and the fantasy of elsewhere, Low writes with a kind of glamorous exhaustion: funny, sharp, wounded, intellectually restless, and suspicious of both cynicism and hope.
This sits beautifully in that zone between autotheory and experimental nonfiction: Maggie Nelson, Chris Kraus, Dodie Bellamy, Kate Zambreno, McKenzie Wark, Wayne Koestenbaum, but with a distinct tonal weirdness of its own. The “socialist realism” of the title is less Soviet aesthetic program than emotional problem: how to imagine a collective future when the self is still vain, scared, embodied, desiring, compromised, and looking for somewhere to live. For readers interested in queer/trans literary nonfiction, art criticism, affect, left melancholy, performance, and books that understand political desire as both serious and faintly humiliating.
Coffee House Press paperback, 2019. Stated as an Emily Books Original. Full number line visible, indicating first printing. Good second-hand condition with light handling and shelfwear visible to cover and corners.
