Raw, sinuous, high-stakes, Bite Your Friends is a subversive memoir and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.
My name is Fernanda Eberstadt. I’m a New York-born writer living in Europe.
I’ve published five novels and two books of non-fiction, the latest of which is BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT, and many hundreds of articles for journals including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Vogue, frieze, Architectural Digest, Granta, lithub.
Some of my running subjects are body art, political dissidence and religious prophecy, Russia, New York in the 60s and 70s. I’ve written about:
The Hebrew Bible.
Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Sicilian palaces, and the politics of urban restoration in Palermo.
The costume artist/street performer Stephen Varble.
The radical utopianism of Hieronymus Bosch.
Why women are scared of turning into their mothers.
Dostoevsky and the literature of the Russian Gulag.
Istanbul (I lived there for a year and a half in the 1990s).
The 20th century Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.
Freak folk musicians Cocorosie.
The British poet Christopher Logue and his glorious retake on Homer’s Iliad.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pussy Riot