Shulamith Firestone’s visionary first book The Dialectic of Sex dared to look at how feminism could shape the future. Finding herself drifting into a new ‘airless space’ after her experience of New York City radical feminist groups, Firestone wrote her first work of fiction. 

Airless Spaces portrays the psychic suffering, bureaucratized poverty and small crises of everyday life. In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness.