Books by Emily Witt
Health and Safety: A Breakdown
by Emily Witt
From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”—New York Times Book Review), a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City
In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.
Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.
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Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love
by Emily Witt
A funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman
Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. Up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience “eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center.” Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, “and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future.”
But, as many of us have found, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently unreciprocated. Sexual experience doesn’t necessarily lead to a future of traditional monogamy―and why should it? Have we given up too quickly on the alternatives?
In Future Sex, Witt explores Internet dating, Internet pornography, polyamory, and avant-garde sexual subcultures as sites of possibility. She observes these scenes from within, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure.
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No Regrets: Three Discussions
by Elif Batuman, Dawn Lundy Martin, Emily Witt, Kristin Dombek, n+1, Emily Gould, Carla Blumenkranz, Sarah Resnick, Sara Marcus, Elizabeth Gumport, Amanda Katz, Namara Smith, Astra Taylor
A follow-up to n+1's 2007 pamphlet What We Should Have Known, No Regrets talks to twelve writers, editors, academics, and artists about life and reading in their early twenties.
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Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire
by Emily Witt
How did Nigeria create the second largest movie industry in the world?
Nollywood began in Nigeria in the 1990s and has grown into one of the most recognized cultural centers of the world, producing more movies every year than Hollywood and almost as many as Bollywood. Emily Witt travels to Nigeria to offer a vivid, rollicking tour of the industry today, from the back alleys of the marketplaces of Lagos to the glamour of a red-carpet premiere, from startups trying to digitalize what has been largely an economy based on piracy to the shooting of a historic epic in the northern city of Jos.
Amid electricity cuts, fuel scarcity, and countless other obstacles, Nigerians are pursuing the very real possibility that Nollywood dramas could become a global brand, as recognizable as the Bollywood musical, the Hong Kong kung fu flick, or the Hollywood blockbuster.
“Emily Witt blends monograph with vivid reportage in her latest offering: a short but sweet study of Nigerian cinema.” —Financial Times
Copies
No copies available.
Future Sex
by Emily Witt
A funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman
Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. Up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience “eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center.” Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, “and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future.”
But, as many of us have found, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently unreciprocated. Sexual experience doesn’t necessarily lead to a future of traditional monogamy―and why should it? Have we given up too quickly on the alternatives?
In Future Sex, Witt explores Internet dating, Internet pornography, polyamory, and avant-garde sexual subcultures as sites of possibility. She observes these scenes from within, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure.
Copies
No copies available.