Significant Others
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Author: frank r. jagoe
Winner of the inaugural 2024 Prototype Prize as judged by T.S. Eliot prize-winner Bhanu Kapil, twice Booker Prize-shortlisted Tom McCarthy, and Turner Prize-winner Elizabeth Prize. 'Significant Others' is a luminous and radical collection of hybrid texts exploring intimacy, language, and the porous boundaries between the human and the other-than-human. 'Significant Others' is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. The title offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life.In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover.
ISBN 9781913513825. Prototype Publishing. pb. 100 pages. 19.8 x 12.9 cm.
available
Winner of the inaugural 2024 Prototype Prize as judged by T.S. Eliot prize-winner Bhanu Kapil, twice Booker Prize-shortlisted Tom McCarthy, and Turner Prize-winner Elizabeth Prize. 'Significant Others' is a luminous and radical collection of hybrid texts exploring intimacy, language, and the porous boundaries between the human and the other-than-human. 'Significant Others' is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. The title offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life.In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover.
ISBN 9781913513825. Prototype Publishing. pb. 100 pages. 19.8 x 12.9 cm.
available