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Book Cover for: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, M. E. O'Brien

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072

M. E. O'Brien

Joining a long line of speculative writing that helps us to understand worlds not yet existing An Oral History of the New York Commune will appeal to readers of Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian M. Banks, Samuel Delaney, and China Mieville among others.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Common Notions
  • Publish Date: Aug 2nd, 2022
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.40in - 4.60in - 0.60in - 0.60lb
  • EAN: 9781942173588
  • Categories: DystopianScience Fiction - Apocalyptic & Post-ApocalypticLGBTQ+ - Transgender

About the Author

O'Brien, M. E.: - 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.


Abdelhadi, Eman: - 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.

Praise for this book

"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 sho