Margins
Discordia book cover
Discordia
2012
First Published
4.15
Average Rating
100
Number of Pages

DISCORDIA is a story of courage and collapse in a country and a culture struggling to map out its future. A short ebook combining a 24,000-word essay with 36 detailed drawings, DISCORDIA is a feminist-art-gonzo-journalism project conceived at Occupy Wall Street and created in the summer of debt and doubt after the euphoric street protests of 2011-2012. In July 2012, artist Molly Crabapple and journalist Laurie Penny traveled to Greece. There, they drew and interviewed anarchists, autonomists, striking workers and ordinary people caught up in the Euro crisis. DISCORDIA is the result. In an impassioned climate where ‘objective’ journalism is impossible, Penny and Crabapple offer a snapshot of a nation in the grip of a very modern crisis where young and old see little reason to go on, the left is scattered and the far right is assuming greater power and influence. Along the way they drink far too much coffee, become hypnotized by street art, and somehow manage not to get arrested or mugged. DISCORDIA is an experiment in form, using the illustrated ebook format to its fullest extent to tell a story unique to the word length and digital platform involved. Crabapple's intricate, Victorian-inspired ink drawings lend a timeless quality to what is a conscious foray into a new kind of journalism - inspired by the New Journalism of the 1970s, in particular the art-journalism collaborations of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman, but reworking that tradition for a 21st century world where young women must still fight at every turn to be taken seriously. DISCORDIA weaves together the personal and political, picking out those elements of the Greek crisis that are recognizable across the West to a generation struggling to articulate its purpose in a world of spiraling unemployment, democratic collapse and civil unrest. The solutions to the failure of modern neo-liberal statecraft are very different to the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' ethos of the sixties: these days the drugs are worse and rock 'n' roll can't save us. The future is a question in search of an answer. Available only digitally, with a foreword by economic journalist and writer Paul Mason, this beautifully illustrated ebook is part-polemic, part-travelogue and part-paean to the birthplace of civilization brought to its knees. Part of the Brain Shot series, the pre-eminent source of short form digital non-fiction.

Avg Rating
4.15
Number of Ratings
204
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Laurie Penny
Laurie Penny
Author · 12 books
Laurie Penny is a journalist, an author, a feminist and a net denizen. She is Contributing Editor at New Statesman magazine, and writes and speaks on social justice, pop culture, gender issues and digital politics for The Guardian, The Independent, Vice, Salon, The Nation, The New Inquiry and many more. She is the author of Cybersexism, Penny Red and Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, as well as Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens, co-authored with Molly Crabapple. Her book, Unspeakable Things, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. In 2010, at the age of 23, she was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. She is a frequent guest on national television and radio, has appeared on Question Time, Any Questions and Newsnight for the BBC, as well as Al-Jazeera and Democracy Now, and has given talks at the Oxford Union and the London School of Economics.
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