'The very short stories in Airless Spaces masterfully depict all kinds of minor atrocities that eventually lead to each persons downfall: a forced shower, a snub, a slow-moving bureaucracy, a repurposed lounge.' - Chris Kraus
In the century Im most familiar with, the twentieth, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insiders tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and theres no one left to shut the door. Eileen Myles
'This book comes out of a long lonely adventure. A season in hell. The result is a series of devastating observations made entirely without rhetoric. It operates like a parabledeceptively simple and stark, almost imagistic as little pieces fit together with little pieces, pretending to be about small outcast lives when in fact it is an encyclopedia of our agea harrowing record of what really goes on among us where the wounds of life bring on the invasion of institutions which inflict still more sufferinga stifling atmosphere of isolations where souls are automatically and needlessly lost. This is a prophetic book with enormous consequences since the airless spaces multiply now and begin to take over.' - Kate Millett
'Reading Airless Spaces in the twenty-first century, I was struck not so much by the books anachronisms but by how apropos to the present it seems, as well as by the forms of sociality and care it does contain beyond first appearances... Filled with loss, loneliness and failures of connection, Airless Spaces insists on taking love seriously by exploring the uneven damage inflicted by an unjust and oppressive world inimical to loving.' - Hannah Proctor
'If Shulamith Firestones last work haunts the feminist movement, it may be because it suggests something disturbing about feminism itself... For Firestone, to live successfully as a woman under patriarchyto submit to the unfairness of gender relations, to smilingly endure your subordinate status and the limits it places on your freedom and dignitywas itself a kind of well-adjusted madness, a trade-off wherein women gained social approval in exchange for accepting the myth of their own inferiority.' - The New Yorker
'In Airless Spaces, one is not born, but rather becomes, a patient. Mental illness is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a product of a warping institution. Firestones characters struggle before they are committed, yet it is the inhumanity of the hospital that ultimately cements their status as outcasts.' - The Washington Post
'If The Dialectic of Sex is a euphoric glimpse of a distant UFO, Airless Spaces is a chemtrail latticing a gray sky, haunting those below... It jostles between depicting people at their most atomizedoutside consensus reality or social contractsand their most blurry and indistinct... While The Dialectic of Sex closes with a vision of earth as it is in heaven, Airless Spaces closes with a paranoid fixation on the hereafter that gradually dismantles Firestones here and now.' - Harper's Magazine
