AL-MARIA, Sophia
SAD SACK

“For me this book is a bag... Like any single-use carrier bag – I disapprove. It shouldn’t exist, it contributes to pollution, it should be banned... And yet, in spite of the fact I know this book may be a waste product... I’m still writing, redacting, expanding... I’m still waiting, wasting, wanting. According to Ursula, ‘It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag’.”
– Sophia Al-Maria

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; opposing “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.” Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her “premature” memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of “Gulf Futurism,” towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry. [publisher’s note]

Published by Book Works, 2019
Design by Tiffany Malakooti
Artists' Writings / Literature