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Amber Husain

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall, Central Saint Martins. Her essays and criticism appear or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Believer, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and elsewhere. She is the author of Replace Me, to be published by Peninsula Press in November 2021.



Articles Available Online


Slouching Towards Death

Book Review

July 2021

Amber Husain

Book Review

July 2021

In January, a preview excerpt in The New Yorker of Rachel Kushner’s essay collection The Hard Crowd (2021) warned us that this might turn...

Book Review

August 2020

Natasha Stagg’s ‘Sleeveless’

Amber Husain

Book Review

August 2020

‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York,...

I broke three contracts in 2016 The first was verbal, a monogamy clause But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody is psychic; I’d just become attuned to it The second was an NDA A man who gave me money asked me to sign it when we first met at the Hyatt near LAX But he got my name wrong, took my Twitter handle for the real thing, so I signed smiling The third and last was this reality show deal Making a documentary about my new, younger friends and their home in Koreatown   It’s been one year since I signed my friends’ lives away during my temporary stay, and two months since I officially joined their lease As is the nature of La Mariposa, most of them have since flown the co-op Morgan is living with her parents in the Bay Alicia is in New York Miffany’s been all over Ditto Max I can’t keep up The only one left is Nadezhda, the one who initially brought me in   Our relationship is sisterly I never had one She keeps asking me if I’m going to do something with this writing I was sharing it with her and the other girls as it came to me, checking my mirror, so to speak They consented yes, always I was told I was trusted, which is a large part of why I knew I had to break our contract – I didn’t want to risk compromising that   In many ways, I feel even more than a year older now I have been Saturn Returning, which is an astrological concept I’m no longer sure I believe in I’ve spent much of the last two years trying to determine how belief determines reality and how much Just last week a Kundalini instructor in Santa Monica speculated that one’s beliefs manifest as event and circumstance She was raised by a Vietnam-born mother, she said, who followed the Chinese zodiac Her mother believed that those years forecast to be bad for her astrological sign would be She feared them And they turned out to be

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall,...

On Having No Skin: Nan Goldin’s Sirens

Art Review

January 2020

Amber Husain

Art Review

January 2020

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers. Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own...
In Defence of Dead Women

Essay

November 2018

Amber Husain

Essay

November 2018

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life. Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends,...

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feature

September 2015

Immigrant Freedoms

Benjamin Markovits

feature

September 2015

My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the...

Interview

June 2011

Interview with Jorge Semprun

TR. Jacques Testard

Pierre Testard

Gwénaël Pouliquen

Interview

June 2011

The great Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprún died on Tuesday 8 June 2011 in Paris, aged 87. A Spanish Civil...

fiction

May 2013

Cabbage Butterflies

Ryū Murakami

TR. Ralph McCarthy

fiction

May 2013

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids...

 

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