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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 had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living’ Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol 5 (1974)   HOSTILE, ALIEN, ALIENATED FROM LIFE   I’m not sure I would make a good collectivist I’m the kind of girl who, when asked by a neighbour to help weed my building’s shared garden, would look up from where I was sun-tanning and say I was too pretty to work (OK – I helped anyway) If dinnertime conversation drifts to utopia, a friend will concede that I can have ‘my own personal corner’ in the commune It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’m not all too gifted at living with other people, even if I romanticise it by dreaming of the ‘hot girl singularity’ that will merge my consciousness with that of my best friends The tendency worries me, given the state of the world Consider that:   The word for world is forest1 The word for world is mother2 The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5 The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders The world is autonomous and alive It teems with life and voices Some voices are hallucinations, resounding across dimensions Some worlds are hallucinations, hewn in great detail from the base material of the void The world is meant to go on, and on, and on, with or without you The world is defined by its boundlessness in time, dis- and reassembling infinitely Yet the world can only be engineered through the finitude of rules, borders, and forces The world isn’t just an impression, smeared together with other impressions; it needs physics, mechanics, and designers to work Because the world labours to understand its own origins, and constantly re-plots the coordinates of where it might like to end up, the world depends on momentum It requires collective desire Without these things – without a tight relation between

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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Interview

Issue No. 18

Interview with Eileen Myles

Maria Dimitrova

Interview

Issue No. 18

I sat across from Eileen Myles at a large empty table in her London publisher’s office a few hours...

Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

Interview

February 2013

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum

Charlie Fox

Interview

February 2013

Perhaps what’s gathered here is not an interview at all. Precisely what it is, we’ll think about in a...

 

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