Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the dead
Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the dead
SHORTLISTED IN THE 2024 STELLA PRIZE!
Hayley Singer's Stella Prize shortlisted book! Read her interview here.
About the Book:
Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote?
Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?
Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?
About the Author:
Hayley Singer writes essays about literature and ecologies, queer embodiment and activism, multispecies in/justices and on reading and writing as worlds end and begin again. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, The Monthly, Cordite Poetry Review, and Writing from Below. She teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne. This is her first book.
Cover artwork: Jo Darbyshire, The Glorious Decline – Magenta, 2018
Note on the first edition from author: The phrase ‘life unworthy of life’ which is deployed in this book comes from the German eugenics document,Authorization for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life (1920). The connection between this eugenics document and ‘the animal condition,’ by which I mean the ranking of certain lives as “inferior” and therefore destroyable, is described in detail in Charles Patterson’s book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002).