Laurie Penny Books In Order

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Laurie Penny is an English author, feminist, journalist, and net denizen. She writes and offers speeches on themes of work focused on pop culture, social justice, digital politics, and feminism for The Independent, The Guardian, The New Inquiry, Vice, The Nation, and many more. She is the type of writer who attracts diverging opinions, with some readers finding her enraging and others enchanting or both at once. Despite this, she never shrugs.

Her book Unspeakable Things, as she describes it, is a detailed manual of how to negotiate the modern patriarchy. She foregrounds her personal life experiences to discuss classism, sex, the cries of the free market and how gender policies affect women’s dreams. As she further describes, the only dreams allowed to the female gender are beautifully wrapped nightmares.

The voice that the author used in this book is sharp, fun, tragic, personal and also collective as she speaks of the young women and men who, for various reasons, don’t fit in the set social and cultural codes. For people who cannot meet the requirements or those who refuse to fit into modern hegemonic masculinity. She builds up her story in five stages through chapters explaining to the reader the condition of young women she often dubs as Fucked Up Girls and young men (Lost Boys) and the smaller number of people who reject them. Penny does her analysis based on a model of capitalistic patriarchy based on both the productive aspects of men and the reproductive aspect of women in the current socio-economic order.

However, the following three chapters pose a challenge to prevailing views of capitalist patriarchy. In the first, she focuses on sex – pornography, prostitution, fantasies of dominance, the issue of transactional sex, restraints and limitations on erotic freedom, objectification and gendered hierarchies, as well as rape and sexual abuse. As with the rest of her case, she describes together issues, problems, and ideas that, in standard political debates, are confined to policy concerns instead of an interlinked structure of hierarchy, control, and power based on a systemic order that must change to improve the situation of those impeded by this gender order, then, she argues, we must not change it by focusing on segregation.

Penny then shifts her focus to cyber sexism in the next chapter. This is not just about the prevalent bullying and violence aimed at women who speak out but also about the shape and structure of the industry but also to the nature and design of the industry, the exploitation of worries about online sexual harassment as a pretext for states to implement new types of surveillance, and the desperation of geeks to cling to their limited social power. Just as the focus on transactional sex, this chapter digs deeper and builds up a strong case for the reader to understand the “distance” between the online world and the real world is less than most of us might recognize.

Finally, Penny turns her focus on love, the foundation of capitalist patriarchy, a fantasy commodity of fairy tale romance accepted by everyone, which she views as patriarchal inverse to sex as seen in the pornification and transactional nature of most of what passes for contemporary sex. She further points out that even modern cultural texts that seem to emphasize women and have women as central characters often feature men as their heroes.

Overall, Unspeakable Things can be, in other words, described as a journal of love and sex in a time of seriousness in an effort to bring out two of the author’s common themes of post-crash politics and gender politics. She argues in a sense that capitalism always creates losers who lack economic vision while the capitalist society defends itself against the losers rage by deflecting it on women. with this notion and her blistering dismissal of authors who only write regarding their middle-class lives for other middle-class audience, one is led to expect something beyond the scientific in this case- perhaps the exploration of the missing working-class voices.

Besides that, she also includes her own account of dealing with an eating disorder and a section focusing on the struggles of young men reflected through her former flatmate. If you enjoy reading books that offer a more grounding approach to feminism without sugar-coating things, then Unspeakable Things is a highly recommended read.

Everything Belongs to the Future is a fantasy book by Laurie Penny, published in 2016. At the turn of the 21st century, humankind discovered the fountain of youth which comes in the form of a blue pill that costs $200 in the black market and is much cheaper for those with insurance. Most people don’t have insurance, and the fountain of youth only increases the gap in class inequality.

Only the wealthiest folks can afford such expensive drugs, while the important people in society- artists, scientists, writers, musicians- can only get sponsorship for their work, but they eventually age and die at the mercy of those rich.

We are introduced to Margo, Nina, Alex and Jasper, a group of activists/artists in an old mouse-infested flat in the poor sides of Oxford city. the group work their day jobs if there are any, but their true passion is to play at Robin Hood. Several times a week, the group load their truck with some stew made from reclaimed food and distribute free meals to Oxford’s poor folks. At the bottom of the free meals is a surprise- a blue pill to help the poor folks extend their life. However, the group’s schemes are shattered when they discover Prof. Daisy Craver, a 95-year-old woman, in a 14-year-old girl’s body. She was one of the pioneers of the blue pill or, instead fountain of life, but she now wants to be an equalizer or, rather, its downfall.

Overall, Everything Belongs to the Future is a dark but richly political story with a degree of certain honesty to its what-if nature. A writer of feminism, social justice and other gender-related issues, Laurie Penny, blends all these themes in her science fiction fantasy novel.