Creep
Accusations and Confessions
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST * A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER
“Quite simply one of the best books of the decade.” —Los Angeles Review of Books * “The mother of intersectional Latinx identity.” —Cosmopolitan * “Brilliant…a hopeful book…rooted in the steadfast belief other worlds are possible.” —The New York Observer * “Witty, confident, and effortlessly provocative.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer * “The most fearless writer in America.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Good Night, Irene
A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.
A creep can be a single figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.
Creep is “sharp, conversational cultural criticism” (Bustle), a blistering and slyly informal sociology of creeps (the individuals who deceive, exploit, and oppress) and creep culture (the systems, tacit rules, and institutions that feed them and allow them to grow and thrive). In eleven bold, electrifying pieces, Gurba mines her own life and the lives of others—some famous, some infamous, some you’ve never heard of but will likely never forget—to unearth the toxic traditions that have long plagued our culture and enabled the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes.
With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from William Burroughs to her grandfather, from Joan Didion to her own abusive ex-partner; she takes aim at everything from public school administrations to the mainstream media, from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Weaving her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These powerful essays by Gurba (Mean) reflect on violence against women and discrimination against people of color. The title essay probes the "mundane horror" of abusive relationships, with Gurba sharing how she became romantically involved with a violent man after her marriage fell apart when she was in her late 30s, and how writing her memoir, Mean, gave her the solace and perspective needed to leave him: "Love and hate were, at last, my choices to make." In "The White Onion," Gurba dissects her relationship as a Chicana Californian with the work of Joan Didion, suggesting that though she "mentored me in irony, detachment, and condescension," Didion romanticizes her pioneer ancestors throughout her oeuvre and "says little about the hardships they inflicted" on the region's Indigenous people. Elsewhere, Gurba teases out similarities between practical jokes and rape, contending both take victims by surprise while humiliating and dominating them ("To survive gender-based violence, sexual violence in particular, one of the things I've had to do is strategically not take it seriously"), and tells how the censures her cousin Desiree received from loved ones after speaking up about being sexually abused by her distant kin led Desiree to start using meth and develop an addiction that eventually landed her in jail. Full of lean prose and biting commentary, this is as emotionally heavy as it is hard to put down.
