A crowdfunded collection of stories, poems, memoir and essays around what it means to be ‘other’. The 3 sections look at where "encounters with otherness are a force for unlocking truths about how we ourselves appear to the crowd"; "how we react to people who don't conform to the default values of our culture"; and "celebrates literature's trick of transporting us into other points of view". Writers include Chomsky, AL Kennedy, Marina Warner, etc.
I didn't like Allnut's poems, or Matt Haig's. Edward Platt's "The Leavers of Boston" was well worth a read. I was interested in Will Storr's essay too - "For decades, psychologists have been researching what's sometimes called the 'minimalist group effect'. The question is, what are the minimal conditions necessary for human brains to start thinking groupishly - to start being biased toward their own 'in' group and prejudiced toward the 'out'?"
Peter Ho Davies' "Fast as Lightning" and Damian Barr's "Look Not with the Eyes" impress in different ways.
The third section has a wider range of pieces, and fewer successful ones.
A.L. Kennedy's has (I think) a mentally non-standard narrator and non-standard other characters - "She's all rhythm and she's got information about the weather and parliament and the best place to buy fruit. Her voice tumbles down and then flicks up. I think there's a bird which does that in its flight. Her eyes are very dark like a bird's eyes./ Birds' eyes are dark, I think, except for eagles and those more complicated kinds of things that kill other birds and creatures".
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