Fernanda Eberstadt
Bite your friends
Europa Editions
March 05, 2024
Fernanda Eberstadt is a New York-born writer who grew up in the heart of the city, surrounded by artists and writers, her parents a fashion photographer and author respectively, and her grandfather the famous poet Ogden Nash. He saw a lot of freedom from a young age in New York, and therefore mixed and associated with countercultural artists who bent social norms to their extremes, such as the infamous Stephen Varble.
Bite your friends finds Eberstadt examining both her own history and the stories of cultural provocateurs, martyrs, and radical thinkers like Varble, who used their bodies as agents of anarchy, protest, and change. She weaves her own story between analyzes of the Christian martyrs Saints Perpetua and Felicita, the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the thinker Michel Foucault, the artist Piotr Pavlensky, the punk protesters Pussy Riot, and the Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes, from whom she has get the title of the book. .
The text weaves in and out of these stories and Eberstadt's text seamlessly and in doing so creates something of an alternative memoir/scholarly examination of both self and other, highlighting within it how the body can be used as protest. It's a fascinating romp through eras and individuals, providing more than a little insight, as well as plenty of places for further study. (www.fernandaeberstadt.com) (www.europaeditions.com)
Author Rating: 7.5/10
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