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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category.
From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.
Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.
Imprint: Spiral House
Series: Portals
Paperback Original
Publication date: 14 April 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7393717-9-1
Extent: 48 pages
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Pre-order: publishing September 2026
With an afterword by Marcus du Sautoy
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin offers a counter-imaginary of place. She takes a non-linear journey through the stories we tell about progress and history, showing a way out of forward-oriented colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological utopias. Drawing upon Taoist philosophy and Indigenous storytelling, she advocates for anti-heroic alternatives to myths of endless growth.
Through Le Guin's characteristically playful prose, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be shows that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds, revealing the possibilities of living differently here and now.
Imprint: Spiral HouseSeries: Portals
Paperback Original
Publication date: 10 September 2026
ISBN: 978-1-9193180-1-1
