Mailing List


Amber Husain

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall, Central Saint Martins. Her essays and criticism appear or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Believer, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and elsewhere. She is the author of Replace Me, to be published by Peninsula Press in November 2021.



Articles Available Online


Slouching Towards Death

Book Review

July 2021

Amber Husain

Book Review

July 2021

In January, a preview excerpt in The New Yorker of Rachel Kushner’s essay collection The Hard Crowd (2021) warned us that this might turn...

Book Review

August 2020

Natasha Stagg’s ‘Sleeveless’

Amber Husain

Book Review

August 2020

‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York,...

Leo had stopped the car and sat talking at the dash He talked like he didn’t want to say any of it, but at the same time he seemed in a hurry to get it out, to reach the end of what he was telling her He was wired with excitement and shame, perched at the brink of a new life now, Jolanta understood as much   She sat in the back seat with her handbag Leo wouldn’t look at her, he kept his eyes straight on the street, the skip outside the neighbours’ house Jolanta looked at him in the rearview, looked hard at the black of his sunglasses   ‘I’ll help you,’ he said, finally   Where the mirror cut off his jaw hung the prayer beads that he had kept after his father died, smooth and dry like his voice, like cockroaches in the sun   Help her? she thought; a sock for the dismembered, and his help for her   She keeps her job at the campsite, beats dawn without an alarm clock now When the motion detector spots her, fluorescent lights suck the dark from the room The white tiles are glossed like wet teeth The floor is littered with paper towels and dragged in leaves The stalls smell of urine She opens the cupboard marked Private, plastic bottles rattling as she hoicks the cleaning cart over the threshold   There are different kinds of shit stains The darker the stain, the longer and harder she must rub with the toilet brush to get the porcelain shining like crockery again A drop flies up in her face, a cold mouche on her lip She wipes it off on the shoulder of her t-shirt and works her way down the stalls Sweat tickles her spine   She continues going into reception to sign off her shifts At the check-in desk, Eva is sitting with her head in her hand She is wearing a blouse with First Camp stitched on the back and a name tag pinned on the front A round office lamp hangs like an unlit gloria above her head   Behind Eva’s swivel chair is the shelf with the

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall,...

On Having No Skin: Nan Goldin’s Sirens

Art Review

January 2020

Amber Husain

Art Review

January 2020

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers. Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own...
In Defence of Dead Women

Essay

November 2018

Amber Husain

Essay

November 2018

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life. Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends,...

READ NEXT

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

Essay

March 2019

Dreaming Reasonably: on Jenny George

Rachael Allen

Essay

March 2019

In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent, a group of women go spelunking and become trapped deep underground...

Interview

July 2015

Interview with Sarah Manguso

Catherine Carberry

Interview

July 2015

There’s a certain barometer of a writer’s achievement that urban readers know well: did this book cause me to...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required