Winter strangers, by Isobel Wohl

Lila said that she needed to get something out of the way: she had never been with someone in a gimp mask, nor had she ever worn a gimp mask herself. So she was a bit nervous. She was bringing this up now because she wanted to be up front. To be totally honest she did not know the first thing about the masks or Fet or Fetlife or what they called the scene or scenes or the lifestyle or any of it. The man said not to worry about that now. Winter strangers did not get what they expected. Winter strangers are not in full bloom. They are in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. The short stories in Winter Strangers examine dynamics of barrenness and thwarted or misrecognised satisfactions. Attempts to give or receive succour founder in the spaces of contemporary alienation where the figures that populate this book contend with the manufacturing and vitiation of their desires. A search for pleasure begins: pleasure at home, online, in work, in the body, in thought and speech, in vision and language. Winter Strangers makes contact with its reader where such pleasures reckon with loneliness and make no compromise. ‘Isobel Wohl’s stories have an unsettling immediacy, charting with a keen eye our coldness and cruelty, our resilience, and small pleasures and tiny perversions. They are like devotions to a strange and wonderful god.’ –> Lauren Elkin Isobel Wohl is a visual artist and writer. Her work concerns itself with distance, capture, loss, and insufficiency as they manifest in the contact and disjunction between sensory experience and grammatical structures. She lives and works in London, U.K., and Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up.