M. E. O'Brien writes at the intersection of communist theory, trans
liberation, LGBTQ social-movement studies, and feminism. A
co-editor of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism, O'Brien's
writing has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Work, Employment &
Society, Commune, Homintern, Endnotes, and Invert. She worked
with the NYC Trans Oral History Project and completed her PhD
at NYU where her research considered how capitalism shaped NYC
LGBTQ social movements. She currently works as a
psychotherapist.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist based in
Chicago, IL. Her research as faculty at the University of Chicago
focuses on gender differences in the community trajectories of
Muslim Americans. Abdelhadi has also spent many years organizing.
She has been involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation,
Black Lives Matter, counter-surveillance and abolitionism, marxist
feminist mobilization as well as workplace struggles. She is
currently co-coordinating the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual
Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds
community by and for Queer Muslims. Abdelhadi maintains an active
creative practice that includes performance art and essay and
poetry writing. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin, Muftah, and
other publications.
“A really fascinating glimpse into a future New York City
after a revolution has transformed the US and much of the world
into an antifascist, communist utopia…necessary and empowering,
providing a hypothetical foundation for an ideal future.“—Buzzfeed,
"34 New Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down" "Every
socialist needs to read this book. Every abolitionist, every
Marxist, every anarchist, every revolutionary needs to read this
book. Every person who has ever wondered how the world will
function after the final retirement of the market, the commodity
form, money, wages, rent, coercive gender roles, prisons, police,
class, nation states, borders, profit, and in general the
dominating power of any humans over any others…It’s a book that
will engage seasoned organizers, well-read academics, and
street-level agitators. It also could serve quite well as a
dazzling introduction for newly politicizing folks who would
benefit from a clear end-goal and would want to know what could be
accomplished by the movements for human liberation.”—Spectre
Journal“[Everything for Everyone] challenges us to not just write
fiction about revolution but to make books that practice the kinds
of collaboration necessary to make revolution…This book is an
uncompromising, anticolonial, profoundly queer and trans, buoying,
addictive, and wholly original creation…Everything for Everyone has
no patience with docile truisms about how we are supposed to write.
Instead, it’s a shot across the bow for contemporary fiction,
raising the bar on how to crystallize utopian longings in literary
form.“—BOMB Magazine“But if you come to Everything for Everyone for
the politics, stay for the writing. Barring Vladimir Nabokov in
Pale Fire, I can’t think of another author who uses an academic
form to achieve a literary result so successfully. Each of the
interviewees and interviewers has an entirely unique and authentic
voice. The book is utterly plausible as the archival project it
claims to be, while also telling gripping stories and slipping in
details to delight sci-fi fans (a space elevator in Quito! Sentient
algae-based AI! Augmented reality implants for dance
parties!).“—TruthOut“Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for
science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. I
spent 15 years as a community organizer and never dreamed of seeing
something that so bravely, brilliantly combines liberational
nonfiction and radical documentary with the exuberance of the best
speculative storytelling.“ —Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning
author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving“Eman Abdelhadi and
M. E. O’Brien’s tall tales of the future draw on real experiences
of the past and present. The book’s multiple narratives, equal
parts hope and pain, merge into a prayer for collective survival
and for the eventual flourishing of our powers of love and
invention. Voices from as-yet-unlived lives instill faith that our
becoming is not yet done. Abdelhadi and O’Brien have created a
vivid image of the possibility that we will one day make a home of
the world.” —Hannah Black “The special magic of Everything for
Everyone is that it combines the genres of the oral history
interview with speculative utopian fiction. Oral histories can show
how in their everyday lives ordinary people can make the world.
Utopian fiction can show the worlds we might want to be making.
Every cook, or sex worker, can govern. And this is the life they
might build from the ruins of this civilization, such as it is.
Such a pleasure to feel one could be making the world over with
them.” —McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the
Street “Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien are changing the game
of what the novel is and what the novel can be. Much as James
Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Imani Perry did with the epistolary
form in non-fiction, Everything for Everyone uses speculative oral
history to expand and explode the limits of what fiction can do.
Their imagined oral histories from many parties help us understand
the present from many possible points of view in the future looking
back, like Rashômon meets House of Leaves. In Everything for
Everyone, binaries (of male-versus-female,
fiction-versus-non-fiction, past-versus-future) are irrelevant
compared to something much more interesting and important that
Abdelhadi and O’Brien seek to illustrate: truth, and the way we
might find liberation in it.” —Steven W. Thrasher, author of The
Viral Underclass“I had no idea I was a post-revolution speculative
fiction fangirl till I started reading Everything for Everyone,
which kicks off with a food riot at the Hunts Point Market led by a
sex worker. I’m really bummed out by the fact that I’ll be
82—hopefully!—when their fictional revolution kicks off and dead by
the time the dust settles. Exciting to read something hopeful,
intersectional and an antidote to our dystopian doldrums.” —Sherry
Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and
Theory of LGBT Liberation “In this genre-bending work of
utopian fiction, O'Brien and Abdelhadi imagine a world that might
emerge from the ashes of our own. Part speculative social
science, part abolitionist manifesto, it explores the social forms
and political possibilities of life after capitalism—the novel ways
of organizing life, doing gender, and coping with the psychic costs
of transformation that may follow the inevitable crises of capital
and climate that lie in our future. Like the best utopian fiction,
Everything for Everyone is also a startling work of political
theory: it gives us the opportunity, as all utopias do, to learn
about our own desires and hopes for a way out of our current
conjuncture.” —Katrina Forrester, author of In the Shadow of
Justice “Leftists are often accused of being against
everything, but not having a vision of what we're fighting for.
Everything for Everyone is a corrective, a sweeping vision of the
type of world and society we imagine can and will provide for us
all, abundantly. Not all beautiful novels are invested in social
restructuring, and not all social restructuring is envisaged in
novels, but here we have exactly their meeting point: a beautiful
novel bristling with the necessary changes we must make to survive
on this planet. The future has sex in it, and community; it has
food and labor and joy. It has trauma and memories of the harm, the
nightmare, of capitalist precarity. The future is sure to exist;
will it have us in it? Everything for Everyone imagines that it
will, and, given this remarkable vision, this perpetual
possibility, it's now our work to live up to it.” —Joseph
Osmundson, author of Virology“Everything for Everyone is a
window into a possible future and a powerful antidote to our
present moment’s ubiquitous moods of anti-utopianism, despair,
nostalgia, and capitalist-realism…this must-read speculative
fiction…chronicle[s] the first stages of the abolition of the
family; the history of the ecological restoration projects and
interplanetary technologies that might render our planet liveable
and leisurely; the invention of real democracy; and the armed
conflagrations that were necessary along the way. So, if you have
ever wondered to yourself, What will the triumph of indigenous land
struggles, the overthrow of colonial occupations, and the fall of
capitalism look like? Which parts of New York would be at the
forefront of a communist revolution, and which would double down
into religious, hyper-patriarchal fascism? Whose knowledges of
facilitation, healing, conflict resolution and partying will help
the population heal from its collective trauma?—then this superb
novel is the book for you.”—Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the
Family: A Manifesto of Care and Liberation
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