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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,...

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School, Wesley Loramar would wait in cubicles at the public lavatory at the beginning of Pier Road, Kinsale, aged sixteen, with the look of the bored cherub in Raphael’s The Madonna of the San Sisto   Kinsale, with its whaling frame houses, was where the pirate, Anne Bonny, was from   Anne’s lawyer father, William Cormac, got a servant girl, Peg Brennan, pregnant The three fled to Charleston, North Carolina where William became a plantation owner   When she was thirteen Anne stabbed a servant girl At sixteen she married and went off with James Bonny, a pirate On sea she had a homosexual companion, Pierre Bouspeut   She decided to elope with another pirate, John ‘Calico’ Rackham On the ship Revenge she met Mark Read who was really Mary Read and they became lovers   The ship was captured October 1720, the men executed, the two women spared because they claimed pregnancy   Wesley, wheaten and auburn hair, Titian red eyebrows, body like a military road, hoping to be picked up, would be seen hitchhiking in school uniform on the Inishshannon Road, three miles North West of Kinsale, close to Dunderrow, not far from the Bandon River   Dunderrow – fortress of oak plain   There is an American chemical factory there now   Coins left by Elizabeth’s forces before the Battle of Kinsale 1601, have been found here   In yesteryears Mrs Harrington would travel by pony and trap from Kinsale each day to teach here, picking up pupils on the way   Her pony was cared for while she was teaching by the Bowen family   A man named Billy the Butlerowned the local manor just prior to Miss Harrington’s career   Bankruptcy had dogged successive owners of that manor and he too went bankrupt   Wesley would be seen coming out of Dunderrow wood, which had the sow-like smell of lesser celandine in spring – slight moustache like the down inside the foxglove – where he’d lain with workers from the chemical factory He was like Orpheus who stole their husbands from the Thracian women   Some said he’d been doing this since he’d worn the grey

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,...

READ NEXT

fiction

April 2014

by Accident

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Rehearsal Room

KJ Orr

fiction

Issue No. 3

He was one of those people you see every day and start to believe you know when in fact...

Interview

Issue No. 2

Interview with Michael Hardt

Chris Catanese

Karim Wissa

Interview

Issue No. 2

Michael Hardt is a philosopher and theorist best known for his collaboration with Antonio Negri on a trilogy of...

 

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