Guest-edited by Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi We're living through hysterical times. Rage, resentment, shame, guilt and paranoia are everywhere surfacing, as is the intemperate adoration or hatred of popular but divisive public figures. Political discourse suffers when people seem to trust only what they feel and can no longer be swayed by reason or facts. If extreme feelings are a contagion within the political cultures of today, so too is the spread of a kind of affectlessness, as if we're starting to resemble the very technologies that threaten to replace us. Featuring vital new fiction, non-fiction, photography and poetry from across the globe, this issue is all about how our feelings make our politics, and how our politics make us feel. Adam Phillips, in conversation, analyses politics in the consulting room David Baddiel probes the outrage of life online Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor witnesses devastation Anouchka Grose on becoming a social justice warrior Peter Pomerantsev unearths his data profile to conduct sentiment analysis Poppy Sebag-Montefiore on China's public sense of touch Fabin Martnez Siccardi on growing up in Patagonia Margie Orford explores shame in South Africa Josh Cohen inspects his own apathy Hisham Matar reflects on Joseph Conrad and Edward Said Hanif Kureishi on Keith Johnstone and Keith Jarrett William Davies on affective politics Chloe Aridjis revisits the wild nights of her teenage years in Mexico City PLUS FICTION: Benjamin Markovits, Olga Tokarczuk and Joff Winterhart POETRY: Alissa Quart and Nick Laird PHOTOGRAPHY: Diana Matar, introduced by Max Houghton Devorah Baum is associate professor in English literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) and The Jewish Joke, and co-director of the documentary feature film The New Man. Josh Appignanesi is a film-maker whose directing credits include the feature films Female Human Animal, The Infidel, The New Man and Song Of Songs. He is a lecturer in Film at Roehampton University, and teaches at the London Film School and other institutions.

Sigrid Rausing describes the changing world of the Estonian Swedes, and the way in which this minority identity was constructed in the various ideologies that have dominated the region since the early twentieth century. In particular she is concerned with the latest of these changes: thepost-Soviet attempt to 'restore' Swedish cultural identity. Rausing touches on a wide range of issues, debates, and insights: the relationship between ideology and form, nationalist and Soviet notions of ethnicity and traditional culture and historically-framed notions of an imagined normality.The ethnographic location for these discussions is a particular former collective farm, now subject to economic decline, the Estonian nation-building ideological project, and new relationships of dependency with Sweden. One of the author's central arguments is that these changes reflect a consciousattempt to 'reform habitus' so as to match that of the local image of the West, but that the location of ethnic culture and many of the operative concepts still reflect the tropes of the Soviet era.

In this engaging introduction, Josh Cohen argues that Freud shows above all that any thought, word or action, however apparently trivial, can invite close reading. Indeed, it may be just this insight that provokes so much opposition to psychoanalysis. By reading short extracts from across Freud's work, addressing the neuroses, the unconscious, words, death and (of course) sex, How to Read Freud brings out the paradoxical core of psychoanalytic thinking: that our innermost truths only ever manifest themselves as distortions. Read attentively, our dreams, errors, jokes and symptoms - in short, our everyday lives - reveal us as masters of disguise, as unrecognizable to ourselves as to others.

A Washington Post Notable Book When a young man is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi, his grief-stricken father and sister bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands. But the murder has stirred up memories long since buried, precipitating a series of events no one could have foreseen. As the truth unfolds, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, hidden deep within the shared past of a family and their conflicted nation. Spanning Kenya’s turbulent 1950s and 1960s, Dust is spellbinding debut from a breathtaking new voice in literature.

How inactivity can be a necessary and creative condition to a life worth living.

Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year (UK) "William Atkins is an erudite writer with a wonderful wit and gaze and this is a new and exciting beast of a travel book."—Joy Williams In the classic literary tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Geoff Dyer, a rich and exquisitely written account of travels in eight deserts on five continents that evokes the timeless allure of these remote and forbidding places. One-third of the earth's surface is classified as desert. Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the Desert Fathers who forged Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert, William Atkins decided to travel in eight of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert and Taklamakan deserts of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Each of his travel narratives effortlessly weaves aspects of natural history, historical background, and present-day reportage into a compelling tapestry that reveals the human appeal of these often inhuman landscapes.

In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a woman's body keeps, from puberty to menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. Through the voices of women around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, My Body Keeps Your Secrets tells the story of the young woman's body in 2021. Moving from girlhood and adolescence to young womanhood, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies in the age of social media.

In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen's stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella's loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen's exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China. Julia Lovell's fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen's wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen's fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find ""the Truth"" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a ""mystical experience""-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.