They: The Lost Dystopian 'Masterpiece' (Emily St. John Mandel)

Description

'I remembered how they began, a parody for the newspapers. No one wrote about them now.' The Sussex coast. Sunsets paint the windswept ocean; seagulls haunt the marshland; hunting rifles crack across hillsides. But this is England through-a-glass-darkly. They are coming closer. They begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Then, the National Gallery is purged; motorway checkpoints demarcate Areas, violent mobs stalk the countryside, destroying cultural artefacts - and those who resist. The surviving writers, artists and thinkers gather together, welcoming 'dissidents' like the unmarried and the childless. These polyamorous communities preserve their crafts, create, love, and remember. But as 'subversives' are captured in military sweeps, cured of identity, desensitised in retreats, they make it easier to forget ... Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.

Kay Dick was a celebrated novelist, writer and editor. Her life began as unconventionally as she was to live it. She was born in London in 1915 to a penniless part-Irish actress and 'baptised' in the Cafe Royal by her bohemian friends. Educated in London and Geneva, she worked at Foyles bookshop and became the first female director of an English publishing house, P.S. King it was recently rediscovered and celebrated as 'a lost dystopian masterpiece' (Paris Review). Dick also researched biographies of Colette, Carlyle and the character of Pierrot; edited anthologies of stories and interviews; and tirelessly campaigned for Public Lending Right alongside Brigid Brophy. For 22 years she lived with her long-term partner, novelist Kathleen Farrell, in Hampstead, before moving to Brighton, where she championed young writers in a book-lined flat with 'cigarettes, cream teas and martinis'. Dick died in 2001. Carmen Maria Machado is the celebrated author of a bestselling memoir, In the Dream House, as well as the award-winning short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of - among others - the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in places including the New Yorker, New York Times and Vogue, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Yaddo. She lives in Philadelphia and is Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.