Daisy Hildyard

Ett gränssnitt är den mekanism som gör det möjligt för oss att interagera med någonting som annars skulle förbli utom räckhåll. Vanligtvis används ordet för mobilernas och datorernas skärmar och tangentbord, som i det här numret diskuteras av författarna Agri Ismaïl och Julia Ravanis, neurovetaren Johan Agorelius, samt en gigarbetande Alice Berggren som prövar att producera träningsdata för olika AI. Men det finns flera andra viktiga gränssnitt. Lina Wolff tar sig in i huvudet på en mördare med hjälp av det litterära skrivandet. Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi ser tonårsflickors outsägliga inre i ljuset av deras poltergeists. Johan Söderberg följer ett gäng medicinhackare som försöker demokratisera tillgången till läkemedel. Och så den allra sista intervjun med den ryska poeten och regimkritikern Lev Rubinstein, som avbröts av hans tragiska dödsfall.

For readers of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Odell, a lyrical work of autofiction that explores the dissolution of boundaries between the self and our earth as we head towards ecological catastrophe. "Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness." --Ayşeg l Savaş, author of Walking on the Ceiling Emergency is a novel about the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. Our narrator is at home during lockdown, where she ponders both past and present. She remembers her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She recalls a kestrel hunt, helping a farmer save a renegade bull, and days playing with her best friend, Clare. In her village, neighbors argue, keep secrets, care for one another, and try to hold down jobs. Fox cubs fight in the woods, plants compete for space, a quarry slowly falls apart, and we see a three-legged deer who likes cake. With painterly vision, Hildyard evokes the bygone, pre-internet world of her schooldays, whose irretrievability signals at something far greater than fleeting youth. With urgent intimacy, Emergency asks us to look at the essential; the people who help define us, animals, local and global ecologies, and to consider what the slow disappearance of Hildyard's and our own native environment might mean for humanity at large. A requiem for the English countryside, a story of remote violence, and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, Daisy Hildyard's Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard's Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.

Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.

Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men.