Streaming Now
Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated lives we carried out in private.
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist and longtime contributor to the Village Voice and NPR's Fresh Air, unapologetically observes against the backdrop of a Zoom call the evolution of feminism over the years, the gendered sexual politics underlying Jeffrey Toobin's public disgrace, rage and hope on the heels of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and the way we continue to pot and maintain our plants amidst the broken narrative of our world's future. As Stone says,
In a time when most of us felt more alone than ever before, Laurie Stone's Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a retroactive but no less timely reminder that we were less alone in our thoughts than we thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Longtime Village Voice contributor Stone (Everything Is Personal) chronicles the pandemic experience—in her life and the world at large— in this closely observed collection. Most of Stone's entries come in diary format and were written from March 2020 to August 2021. She moves easily between the mundane (details of things she's planted, shows she's watching) and the philosophical (one day, she regrouts tile and watches Nomadland on Netflix, reflecting on "the way life ineluctably dwindles to lessness and bewilderment, no matter what you plan or don't plan"). Later essays capture the tenuousness of connection and the allure of voyeurism: "Everyone's life is a TV show you forget other people are watching," she writes in "Catering," while in "Friend" she declares herself bored by morality. There's also "Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus, or How to Write in a Way That Will Be Reviled Until Everyone Will Read You as Necessary," a review of Kraus's biography of Acker, which in its sharp takes shows Stone's gifts as a critic. As a collection of moments and observations, there are highs and lows: some entries are less enlightening while others bristle with insight. Fans of creative nonfiction will find Stone an animated guide to these disjointed times.
