People who Lunch: essays on work, leisure & loose living

This is an utterly riveting and original collection of essays – hard-thinking, formally innovative, dazzling intellectually and sentence by sentence out-of-this-world good.
– Maria Tumarkin

The Melbourne-based critic’s debut runs a gamut of social scenes (most of them pretty club-heavy): secret societies to art fairs to crypto. Every piece in the collection – subtitled “essays on work, leisure & loose living” – asks you to think harder about the ways we earn money, party, and look out for each other. Olds’ writing is relaxed and direct, driven by sharp intellect and a radiant, unaffected interest in the world around her. With enviable clarity and style, she pares back assumptions about class and sex. And she is unafraid of taking the scalpel to her own life – questioning, in a riveting essay on polyamory, the political potential we might seize, or miss, in the ways we structure our closest relationships. Another writer once described Olds to me as “very underrated” – this book should sort that out. (Plus: the year’s best cover? I think yes.)
– Imogen Dewey, Guardian Australia 

A remarkable debut, Sally Olds's People Who Lunch is a collection of essays that delves into secret societies, clubbing, polyamory, the possibility of universal basic income, post-work futures, the perils of half-baked literary criticism, and cryptocurrency – all brilliantly tied together by Olds's humour, intelligence and energy. The result is miraculous.
— ABC Arts

It's rare to find new writing this bold and exciting.
— Books+Publishing

... unique and refreshing. It probes into some of the most intimate areas of modern society and interrogates our ideals with dazzling skill and brevity.
— Readings Monthly

Olds’s muted but sustained belief in the possibility and necessity of social change allows her to investigate, with a perceptiveness devoid of cynicism, our clumsy attempts to live out our ideals within a far from ideal world.
— The Saturday Paper

Olds brings this unsparing scrutiny informed by rigorous politics to bear on the business of work, writing, clubbing, and the dream of utopia, coolly analysing herself and her milieu ...
— The Age Cover artwork: Tim Hardy, Idols, 2019. Digital c-print.