Silver Press

We are honoured to publish AIRLESS SPACES by Shulamith Firestone with an accompanying Reader including pieces by Laya Firestone Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, Chris Kraus, Lola Olufemi and Hannah Proctor.

In 1990, Shulamith Firestone was referred to the Intensive Case Management programme by a psychiatric unit. There she met Lourdes Cintron, to whom she dedicated AIRLESS SPACES ‘as promised in hospital’. Cintron wrote the following:

‘Shulamith’s writing and publishing Airless Spaces is an achievement that counters prejudice and misinformation about people with mental illness as doomed to live in a mental fog. While she was struggling, Shulamith’s intellect, her commitment to feminism, and her humanistic spirit were all intact; she cared for the downtrodden, some of whom she came to know personally during those years of roaming the streets of NYC. She took mental notes during forced hospitalizations, which she later used in the book, and which speak about the strength of her memory. She was waiting for some peace of mind to pour her creativity out again.’

Happy birthday Leonora Carrington, born on this day in 1917!

‘In many changes of shape, Carrington fulfilled, over nearly a century of work, the task of art as defined by Paul Klee: to make visible the invisible. She conveyed her consciousness, its complex of memory, fantasy, desire and fear, reaching for the apt metaphors to hand from a rich deposit of learning. “The matter of our bodies,” she said, “like everything we call matter, should be thought of as thinking substance.” As Doris Lessing, one of Carrington’s favourite authors, wrote: “The longest journey is in.”’

Marina Warner, from her Afterword to The Debutante and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, published by Silver Press on Leonora’s birthday in 2017 💛

Image: Self-portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) by Leonora Carrington