"This intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and
unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at
stake." -Rachel Kushner
During a residency on Fire Island, artist and writer Hannah Black
decided to tackle a highly daunting project: the 2020 novel. The result
of her efforts, Tuesday of September or the End, is a slim, playful
work of speculative fiction. Written in the aftermath of the early
months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020, the novel
explores the ruptures of the year with a satirical sci-fi bent. Black
chronicles the lives of two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend
with rapidly changing political possibilities during the pandemic while
the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e. Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens
finally invade earth. Through a galvanic vision of how the riots of 2020
might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective
life. This crucial novel invites readers to consider who we are--and, by
extension, what we are here for--when our normal referents are muted,
deleted and upended.
Hannah Black (born 1981) is a New York-based visual artist, critic
and writer from Manchester, England. Her work spans video, text and
performance and draws from communist, feminist and Afro-pessimist
theory. She is the author of Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable) and
Dark Pool Party (2016). Black is represented by the gallery Arcadia
Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin.
