Tools for Extinction | Ed. Denise Rose Hansen
Tools for Extinction | Ed. Denise Rose Hansen
New work by Enrique Vila-Matas, Olivia Sudjic, Jon Fosse, Inger Wold Lund, Vi Khi Nao, Patrícia Portela, Lucie Elven, Mara Coson, Christina Hesselholdt, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Naja Marie Aidt, Michael Salu, Joanna Walsh, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Anna Zett, Emilio Fraia, Frode Grytten, and Olga Ravn
Translations by Margaret Jull Costa, Zoë Perry, Martin Aitken, Denise Newman, Paul Russell Garrett, Damion Searls, and Rahul Bery
Eighteen international writers respond to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today.
Meditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease – or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species’ trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants, and foodstuffs around us in a new light?
The anthology takes its name from Steven Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture compendium of product reviews, essays, and articles on the themes of self-sufficiency, ecology, and alternative education. By giving “access to tools”, a new social order and a more sustainable Earth was imagined.
Compiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen.
You can listen to Inger Wold Lund reading her story here.
Publication 21 May 2020
Description 200 × 130 mm, 120 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-9999928-2-8
Design Ard — Chuard & Nørregaard
Read sample Here
Praise for Tools for Extinction
The strongest lockdown literature
– Michael La Pointe, TLS
All the pieces here feel like they could end abruptly. They often do. This gives the collection a start and stop quality that feels appropriate. Our newsfeed minds are often diving in and self-ejecting out of intimate scenes from others’ lives. Reading this book is akin to wandering around the authors homes, seeing if they’ve got any grand truths on the mantelpiece or in the basket on the landing. But there’s often no lesson to be learned from solitude other than the experience of it. The hope carried in this book is that we can lean on fiction even beyond its breaking point – and our own
– Republic of Consciousness
Tools for Extinction grapples with the grief, trauma and anxiety of Covid-19 without presenting these phenomena as something entirely new. It is not a time capsule or a pandemic diary. It is not meant to be a record of an aberration to be read in libraries and schools in 2021 that look just like those of 2019. Tools for Extinction is meant to show that artists will have to adapt. The fact that the book came together in a few short months during a lockdown shows it can be done. And the resonance that the writing has for a reader still in lockdown shows that art still matters
– Artists’ Books Reviews
I'm greatly impressed with the speed at which this book was put together but also that it takes a global view from authors from nearly every continent and many different cultures. In a time of such extreme physical separation and when it's impossible to know when I'll be able to travel internationally again it's comforting to hear the immediacy of these voices from around the world. It's also touching to see overlapping observations between countries whether it's the experience of viewing individuals smoking on distant balconies or similar feelings of loneliness felt in very different locations
– The Lonesome Reader
Tools for Extinction is acute literature. . . it signals the emergence of crisis-responsive fiction
– Klaus Rothstein, Weekendavisen
Spending many weeks in lockdown in Belgrade, I was keenly aware of how easily silence breaks when the sirens ensue. I remember that period of time in a somewhat somnambulant manner, which is why Jon Fosse’s piece titled ‘Krakk, Krakk; has resonated with me so profoundly. . . Following Fosse’s narrator, I was on the verge of rekindling the eerie feeling I sometimes had while in lockdown, that of losing track of both time and reality, night and day
– Anglozine