A new genre—relationships the Soft Skull way
In the manner of a certain familiar throat-clearing: I am sometimes asked what kind of books Soft Skull publishes—a recent rote response has been that we don't rule out any genre, it just needs to be a book that in some fashion is of-but-in-opposition-to that particular genre.
As with my generalizations generally, there's a little bit of truth in it—we just published a few weeks ago, our first ever relationships book Making Love, Playing Power: Men, Women, & the Rewards of Intimate Justice by Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio. He's an author who contacted us at the suggestion of Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist we publish (White Like Me) and has done what is in effect a political book on relationships best summed up (I hope) by the tagline on the cover...
"The reason men don't listen to women is not because men can't understand what women say [pace John Gray]. The reason men don't listen to women is because they can get away with it."
Basically, it argues that for relationships to work, we can't pretend that classism, racism, and patriarchy don't exist...