Joanna Walsh – författare

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies—the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The internet has collapsed the boundaries of time, space, and desire. However far apart lovers are, they can instantly be present. So can they ever really break up?This is the question Walsh''s narrator must reckon with as she travels across Europe after the end of a love affair conducted largely online. This pilgrimage through ''offline'' space dictated by chance - on railways, on buses, on planes and, above all, on foot - wrestles with the dangers of converting longing into language, and reclaims and reshapes the territory of the male travel writer by creating personal and innovative maps of cities by which Walsh navigates the complexities of modern love.This is a work about borders - between places, people, genres - and how we might cross them. Challenging the divisions between intellect and intimacy, Walsh blends the personal and the critical to tell a mystery story about her own reality. But Break.up also challenges the borders between fiction and non-fiction, ranging widely into eclectic essays on music, boredom, shame, photography, marriage, art.From Rome to Budapest, Freud to Foucault, algorithms to nostalgia, this is a stimulating, original work which dismantles what we know of love, and how we make art from it, and finds a new form and language for the way we love now.

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as ''girls online'', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil''s bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ''accounts'' of personal ''experience''. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.

Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as 'meatspace' job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we're creating online, it isn't amateur anymore. But is it art?In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as 'meatspace' job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we're creating online, it isn't amateur anymore. But is it art?In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

Have you ever sped past in such a hurry that everything you passed was soft and blurry? And did you ever squeeze your eyes so tight that you saw lots of dots of coloured light? In Did You Ever See? Joanna Walsh vividly illustrates the world through the eyes of a small child looking at things for the first time, inviting children and adults to playfull explore the sense of sight. Pondering how things can look tiny from above, enormous from below, backwards in a mirror, wobbly through water, and blurry from a distance, Did You Ever See? appeals immediately to the senses of young readers and puts into words a variety of visual experiences. Children will be inspired to take notice of both what and how they see the world around them, gaining new perspectives as they do.

This is a woman as a mother, daughter, wife, spectator, lover, mistress. Observer and commentator. Actor and reactor. Dressed up bright as a child or submerged in the grey elegance of Paris, she shifts readily between roles, countries, and languages. Skilled and successful, she controls how much she cares.Yet as every new woman emerges and every new story is told, each with a sharper, more deadpan, more aching simplicity, the calm surfaces of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo shatter, pulling us deep into the panic that underlies everyday life.

The much-anticipated fiction follow-up to Vertigo, this collection cements Joanna Walsh's reputation as one of the sharpest writers of this century. Wearing her learning lightly, Walsh's stories make us see the world afresh while showing us she has read the world. In 'Like a Fish Needs a ...' - perhaps the funniest, most freewheeling story ever written about cycling (and Freud and and and ...) you read shenanigans worthy of Flann O'Brien. Meanwhile, in 'Worlds from the Word's End', Walsh conjures up a country in which words themselves fall out of fashion - something that will never happen wherever Walsh is read.

Un libro encantador que muestra que, en numerosas situaciones y circunstancias, no hay nadie como tu papá. Una celebración a los padres de todos los rincones del mundo.«Nadie ronca tan fuerte como mi papá. Nadie pedalea tan rápido como mi papá. Nadie es tal alto como mi papá. No hay otro como él:¡mi papá es único!».

Una celebració als pares de tots els racons del món. Un llibre encantador que mostra que, en moltes situacions i circumstàncies, no hi ha ningú com el teu pare.«No hi ha ningú que ronqui com el pare. Ni que pedalegi com ell. Ni ningú que faci la seva alçada. I és que és absolutament únic, el pare!».

Observa cómo los dos pequeños cachorros de tigre disfrutan de un día lleno de diversión con su amorosa madre. Un libro encantador que muestra que, en cualquier situación o circunstancia, no hay nadie como tu mamá.«No existe sonrisa más grande ni más resplandeciente que la sonrisa de mi mamá. Nadie me hace reír como ella. Nadie me abraza como ella. En realidad, es muy sencillo. ¡Mi mamá es única!».

Observa com els dos petits cadells de tigre gaudeixen d'una dia ple de diversió amb la seva amorosa mare. Un llibre encantador que mostra que, en qualsevol situació o circumstància, no hi ha ningú com la teva mare.«El somriure més gran i brillant de tots és el de la meva mare, ho sabieu? Ella em fa riure com ningú més, i les seves abraçades no les canvio per res. La meva mare és única! Amb això ja us ho dic tot».

La mujer como madre, hija, esposa, amante… Como observadora, como narradora o como actriz. Vestida casi como un niño o sumergida en la gris elegancia parisién, cambia fácilmente de papel, de país, de idioma.Experta y exitosa, controla cuanto le importa. Sin embargo, a medida que emerge cada nueva mujer y se cuenta cada nueva historia de este extraordinario libro (con una simplicidad más nítida, hierática y dolorosa a medida que pasan las páginas), la tranquila superficie de Vértigo se rompe y nos hundimos en el pánico que subyace en la vida cotidiana. Una de las sorpresas literarias del presente."Walsh es buena porque es cruel y no tiene piedad ni con sus heroínas ni con sus lectores: así sea. El vértigo significa, sobre todo, ser y tener un cuerpo: la tentación del precipicio y el miedo a la caída; la incapacidad de huir de los roles femeninos, el todavía increíble machismo. Es la glorificación de la juventud, la idolatría de la belleza. Es el paso del tiempo, el envejecimiento."Begoña Méndez, El Mundo

Como su celebrado Vértigo (Periférica, 2018), esta nueva colección de relatos de Joanna Walsh es el inclemente y humorístico acoso a un tema: la incomunicación, en este caso, la imposibilidad de establecer un contacto integral.Las protagonistas de estos cuentos (narradoras en primera persona) categorizan los hábitos de lectura según las relaciones de una pequeña comunidad algo envidiosa; o salen a una calle con tráfico a vender una mercancía imposible; o esperan durante meses en una estación de tren extranjera a que su cita llegue; o escriben una "vieja" carta postal para romper una relación en un momento en que las personas han aprendido a hablarse con interjecciones. Son proyectos de vida tan desubicados como locuaces: lanzados al mundo con la misión de usurpar una identidad, la suya propia.Divertida y cruel, imaginativa en la elección de sus formatos y precisa incluso cuando nombra los afectos más ambigüos, Joanna Walsh es una escritora irrepetible, sólo comparable a aquellos maestros (desde Kafka hasta Lydia Davis) que han dado al relato breve la capacidad subversiva de pensar lo impensable. "Siempre envuelta en una atmósfera cómica, la realidad en los relatos de Walsh es poco fiable. La autora se recrea oponiendo realismo y fantasía, autobiografía y ficción, explora lo absurdo de estos límites, su indistinción. Sus narraciones, inteligentes y llenas de autoparodia, capturan el desorden existencial del escritor, pero también el de cualquiera que encuentre la vida real extraña y, en ocasiones, bastante irreal". Joanna Kavenna, The Guardian