Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening

Review\nStone’s writing is perfect for this state, in which thinking is, on the one hand, self-referential and labored, and on the other hand, a lifeline...the reader gets to be immersed in Stone’s remarkable mind. —MASHA GESSEN, The New Yorker\nLaurie Stone’s Everything Is Personal is a galvanic account of our era, a trumpet blare aimed at sleepwalkers. In essays and diary entries that are sharply observant, grieving and generous, Stone seeks links between 1968 and now, meditating with wit and complexity...A voice unlike any other, she’s a fearless thinker in an age submerged in fear. —EMILY NUSSBAUM, The New Yorker\nUpsetting the balance of the universe is a job description I would have liked,” remarks the narrator in one of Stone’s stories. The same can be said of Stone, with her acute and kinetic prose. Heartbreak, comedy, exuberance and nuance: they’re all here and they’re pure pleasure. —MARGO JEFFERSON, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Negroland\nAn extraordinary work, remarkably and unflinchingly true to its author’s powerful, instantly recognizable voice—full of wisdom and passion and fierce intelligence....There is great beauty in this brave book, right at the very heart of it. —MIKHAIL IOSSEL, author of Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling\nEverything is Personal belongs on the shelf with Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Adorno’s Minima Morialia, books that deliver great wisdom in rolling waves of epigrams....[Stone's] powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think, how to think in this time. —MICHAEL TOLKIN, author of The Player\nTo read Laurie Stone’s Everything is Personal: Notes on Now is to read Laurie Stone, is to experience a present tense intimacy with a lusty, testy, ebullient, scintillating mind....Read Laurie Stone. Read this book. —DIANE SEUSS, author of Four-Legged Girl\nHer thinking and feeling are smack dab in the middle of things, tuning into almost everything in our world, especially time. I’ve never considered the phrase ‘patient urgency’ until I read this book, and I’ll definitely be moving forward in my life with this framework for criticism and living. —STEVEN DUNN, author of POTTED MEAT\nFree and freeing, clear and bright, a cyclone of history written by an acutely observing eye, Everything is Personal makes radical social change and individual transformation seem not only necessary but inviting and funny. Laurie Stone has given us ‘a place to live while the world learns to breathe again. —JOSEPH KECKLER, comic performer, opera singer, and author of Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World\nThere are many excellent essays here, but the one I’m most excited by is ‘The Clock’, which is admirably complicit, resistant to all manner of received wisdom, self-questioning, ferocious, and little short of revelatory. I am a besotted fan. —DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger\nLaurie Stone’s exhilarating, unclassifiable book brings the stinging wit and ferocious political engagement of the feuilleton tradition of Joseph Roth into the age of the Social Media thread, with its built-in fluidity and openendedness, to brilliant effect. I can’t remember when I last read anything as alive, alert, self-questioning and independent-minded as Everything is Personal. —JAMES LASDUN, author of The Fall Guy\nStreaming 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.
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