Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s. We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Café d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on Twitter that she had been hit with a drug possession charge, which she insisted was a scheme to keep her Weinstein dirt quiet. I hadn't even read her Weinstein story… I still wanted to know that the articles were being published, and in large quantities, but reading stories of abuse and humiliation was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn't feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless. I wanted to watch the patriarchy go up in flames, but I wasn't excited about what was being pitched to replace it. If we got all of it out in the open, what would we have left? My fear was that guilt would destroy the classics and there'd be no one left to fuck. All movies would be as low-budget and as puritanical as the stuff they play on Lifetime, all of New York would look like a Target ad, every book or article would be a cathartic tell-all, and I'd be sexually frustrated but too ashamed to hook up with assholes, or even to watch porn. —from Sleeveless Eve Babitz meets Roland Barthes in Sleeveless, Natasha Stagg's follow up to Surveys, her 2016 novel about internet fame. Composed of essays and stories commissioned by fashion, art, and culture magazines, Sleeveless is a scathing and sensitive report from New York in the 2010s. During those years, Stagg worked as an editor for V magazine and as a consultant, creating copy for fashion brands. Through these jobs, she met and interviewed countless industry luminaries, celebrities, and artists, and learned about the quickly evolving strategies of branding. In Sleeveless, she exposes the mechanics of personal identity and its monetization that propelled the narrator of Surveys from a mall job in Tucson to international travel and internet fame.

The literary 'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the 'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.

"A popular story about the 1960s and 1970s holds that this was when Britain shook off the vestiges of an oppressive Victorian moralism. Many of those campaigning against censorship saw it this way. But this was also a struggle that pitted Victorian liberalism against supposedly Victorian morals. John Stuart Mill's ideas provided a way of thinking about freedom, personal autonomy, and the social contract for people who otherwise had little in common with Victorian liberals. This book by Chris Hilliard of the University of Syndey will show how readers and editors, lawyers and law enforcement, politicians and philosophers grappled with questions of freedom, authority and order as a famously deferential society became increasingly pluralist. It was in the aftermath of the publication of affordable English language editions of the works of Emile Zola, in the late 19th century, that this essentially Victorian conflict first materialised in recognisable form. It was in 1960, when Penguin were tried for obscenity after the publication, in English, of the first unedited edtion, that this conflict reached both a crescendo and then a settlement. The book is divided into four parts, each tracing the story of a different phase in the history of obscenity law in Britain. There are also three "interludes" examining areas of law that came into tension with the social changes of the modern period-libel, sedition, and blasphemy. The interludes place struggles over obscenity in a larger cultural context and deepen the legal analysis by exploring the conceptual and policy challenges thrown up by other common-law misdemeanors and tort law"--