Description
About Polly Barton
Polly Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. She lives in Bristol.
About Porn: An Oral History
How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire.
Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter – not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren’t saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.
About Jessica Andrews
Jessica Andrews’ debut novel, Saltwater was published by Sceptre in 2019 and won the Portico Prize in 2020. It explores mother-daughter relationships and shifting class identity in relation to place and the body. Her second novel, Milk Teeth was published by Sceptre in 2022 and interrogates wanting, denial, food and shame. She is a Contributing Editor at ELLE magazine and she writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4 and Stylist, among others. She was nominated for the ELLE list in 2020, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures and longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2022. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City University, London.
