People Who Lunch: On Work, Leisure, and Loose Living

Australian essayist Olds debuts with a striking collection loosely focused on how people respond to economic precarity and dream up better futures. In “For Discussion and Resolution,” Olds weaves the history of utopian, polyamorous experiments into an account of her own polyamorous relationship. She explains that free love communes stretching back to 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier, who envisioned communities with rotating partners and jobs, believed that sex, like other forms of labor, should be distributed equitably among members. Just as those experiments struggled to live up to their founding principles, Olds notes that her own commitment to polyamory was challenged after her partner fell in love with another woman, but she maintains that “it’s always possible, of course, that both monogamy and polyamory are deeply unnatural.” Olds has a talent for probing the ironies of late capitalism, exploring in “Crypto Forever” how digital currencies appeal both to those who feel marginalized by traditional markets (such as the sex worker and the money-strapped PhD student she profiles) and those who think crypto is capitalism’s “next leap forward.” Elsewhere, Olds reflects on clubbing as a type of labor and argues that the hybrid essay is “a form that preserves and reproduces tradition... while pretending to annul it.” Olds’s idiosyncratic perspective consistently surprises, and she elegantly blends cultural, historical, and class analysis into an easy to digest whole. This is a pleasure. (Feb.)