Polly Barton

Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hisori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan. Irreverent, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is an exceptional debut about the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.

How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with nineteen acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we arent saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.

A landmark work of oral history interrogating everything and anything related to porn

El porno es uno de los contenidos más consumidos en Internet y, sin embargo, sigue siendo un tabú del que poco se habla, pese a la relevancia social que tiene.En este libro, Polly Barton investiga las causas de la ausencia de debate en torno a un tema silenciosamente ubicuo pero muy influyente en nuestro dia a dia. A lo largo de un año de trabajo, Barton se entrevisto con diecinueve personas de edades, generos y orientaciones sexuales muy distintas para tratar de entender este fenomeno, charlando con ellas sobre la pornografia y sus implicaciones: habitos de consumo, emociones y sentimientos (culpa, verguenza, asco, sorpresa, curiosidad), fantasias y deseos.Lejos de lo que habia imaginado inicialmente, lo que emergio no fue un relato ni un ensayo en el sentido tradicional, sino la descarnada fotografia de aquello que no queremos ver y no solemos decir. Informal, didactico, desafiante, revelador, este libro es un viaje sin tapujos por los meandros mas insospechados de una realidad tan aparentemente sobreexpuesta como en el fondo desconocida.Un libro fascinante y oportuno, un testamento del valor de las conversaciones deshinibidas entre adultos. Su honestidad y su humanidad son adictivas, te atrapan. Claire-Louise Bennett, autora de Caja 19

El porno es uno de los contenidos más consumidos en Internet y, sin embargo, sigue siendo un tabú del que poco se habla, pese a la relevancia social que tiene. En este libro, Polly Barton investiga l

El porno es uno de los contenidos más consumidos en Internet y, sin embargo, sigue siendo un tabú del que poco se habla, pese a la relevancia social que tiene. En este libro, Polly Barton investiga l

What does it mean to lose yourself and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Bartons formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication.