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The Leftovers
This is a masterpiece of female/feminist empathy and genius. Art and nature, violence and literature, the impact of one’s own life and the lives one seeks to feed us, to help us make a sort of sense of it all—The Leftovers is alive with fierce intelligence and deep emotion. It’s a whole new kind of book, a brainy swirl of everything most sublime and most terrible about the world we inhabit.
—Michelle Tea
Shaelyn Smith’s The Leftovers extends the table of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party: it pronounces more of the names that should be pronounced; it draws in a wider range of practicing artists; it expands and complicates the context through which we read Chicago’s feminist and recuperative gesture… The Leftovers learns how to care for each level in this living environment and leaves the reader with a feeling that she’s learned something and planted something simultaneously.
—Renee Gladman
In prose both journalistically obsessive and poetically seductive, Smith inscribes our invitation to the banquet of feminist art. What better to slow-look in this moment than an installation dedicated to expanding our understanding of what women have brought to the table. Reading Smith is like watching a skilled collagist reassemble the female body from disparate crime scene photos and defiant snapshots. I feel reanimated. The Leftovers is thrilling and necessary work.
—Karyna McGlynn
—Michelle Tea
Shaelyn Smith’s The Leftovers extends the table of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party: it pronounces more of the names that should be pronounced; it draws in a wider range of practicing artists; it expands and complicates the context through which we read Chicago’s feminist and recuperative gesture… The Leftovers learns how to care for each level in this living environment and leaves the reader with a feeling that she’s learned something and planted something simultaneously.
—Renee Gladman
In prose both journalistically obsessive and poetically seductive, Smith inscribes our invitation to the banquet of feminist art. What better to slow-look in this moment than an installation dedicated to expanding our understanding of what women have brought to the table. Reading Smith is like watching a skilled collagist reassemble the female body from disparate crime scene photos and defiant snapshots. I feel reanimated. The Leftovers is thrilling and necessary work.
—Karyna McGlynn
- GenresNonfictionArt
232 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 19, 2021
Every person interested in art and intersectional feminism should read this book.
September 9, 2018
Loved this thoroughly researched, well-written book, which uses Judy Chicago's work as the center for extended meditations on feminist art, food, and violence. Learned a great deal. Highly recommend!
March 29, 2018
It's really one of the best collections of essays I've ever read. Smith has a total command over the essay form, and (more importantly) a nuanced and empathetic view of a rough world. "The Leftovers" is truly truly a triumph. And it's the kind of book that makes me want to write, to learn, to be a better person. 100% recommend.
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April 26, 2022Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was on the way out of Housing Works, sad that I didn’t find anything, then saw this on the shelf by the door. Sometimes books you buy on a whim are even better than the ones you wait months for.
Some memorable bits:
- “There is not enough in this world to fill us up. It won’t keep us from trying.”
- “…collapsing into each other, soft as overripe fruit.”
- “When my best friend and I get together we eat and drink with abandon. I realize now that this constitutes both my definition of love and my definition of luxury. I realize how lucky I am to have identified the definition.”
- “Cooking as tradition, culture, memory, requiem. The plate becomes inextricable from our desire for connection, for love. The plate becomes a metonym for how we live our lives. The fuller the plate, the fuller the life.”
- “Robert Morris’s 1961 piece “box with the Sound of Its Own Making” is a simple wooden box that plays from within a recording of the making of the very box in which it’s held: three and a half hours of sawing and sanding and pounding, on loop. The general capacity of human beings: we can do anything, within our specific confinements and containers. We still are anything we ever were: a reeling and clinking of remembered sounds, collected textures.”
- Chapter alternating between descriptions of the women at the table and some missing and murdered women who have been left out of Judy’s narrative
- Passages explaining horribly ironic golf courses promising great views of the nearby prison, (but doesn’t allow people without proper ID, thought without verified background checks, anyone listed on a current or former facility visitation list onto the grounds) triathlons entitled “escape from Alcatraz”, restaurants based on prison food and cafeterias, waiters are formerly incarcerated individuals
- Everything about Marina Abramović
- “It’s hard when you love, but it’s even harder to lose love. But this is how we get stronger: we shrink the space. We learn to live in reality rather than in imagination. We learn to let some things go. We learn to accept that there will always be unknowables. To surrender to love is to be vulnerable to appetite.”
Some memorable bits:
- “There is not enough in this world to fill us up. It won’t keep us from trying.”
- “…collapsing into each other, soft as overripe fruit.”
- “When my best friend and I get together we eat and drink with abandon. I realize now that this constitutes both my definition of love and my definition of luxury. I realize how lucky I am to have identified the definition.”
- “Cooking as tradition, culture, memory, requiem. The plate becomes inextricable from our desire for connection, for love. The plate becomes a metonym for how we live our lives. The fuller the plate, the fuller the life.”
- “Robert Morris’s 1961 piece “box with the Sound of Its Own Making” is a simple wooden box that plays from within a recording of the making of the very box in which it’s held: three and a half hours of sawing and sanding and pounding, on loop. The general capacity of human beings: we can do anything, within our specific confinements and containers. We still are anything we ever were: a reeling and clinking of remembered sounds, collected textures.”
- Chapter alternating between descriptions of the women at the table and some missing and murdered women who have been left out of Judy’s narrative
- Passages explaining horribly ironic golf courses promising great views of the nearby prison, (but doesn’t allow people without proper ID, thought without verified background checks, anyone listed on a current or former facility visitation list onto the grounds) triathlons entitled “escape from Alcatraz”, restaurants based on prison food and cafeterias, waiters are formerly incarcerated individuals
- Everything about Marina Abramović
- “It’s hard when you love, but it’s even harder to lose love. But this is how we get stronger: we shrink the space. We learn to live in reality rather than in imagination. We learn to let some things go. We learn to accept that there will always be unknowables. To surrender to love is to be vulnerable to appetite.”
February 21, 2024
I first heard of Judy Chicago and Shaelyn Smith when Masque & Spectacle published an early version of "The Last Supper." I'm glad I finally got around to reading this collection in its entirety.
Like Chicago's work, this collection is a bit of an homage to women and art, though Smith points out the limitations of the Chicago's representatives and"extends the table" as Renee Gladden writes for the back of the book.
Because of that extension, I wish she did more with animals. There is so much about food: details about cooking (often meat) sit next to sections about violence toward women. I expected more to develop when it came to the violence of hunting, butchering, shucking, and otherwise preparing meat. That particular kind of violence seemed to be just at Smith's periphery, and it, too, fits into the larger explorations about desire & entitlement, social norms, and bodies in (culinary) art.
On the whole, I thought The Leftovers was a thoughtful, elegant collection of essays. I hope to see more of Shaelyn Smith's work soon!
Like Chicago's work, this collection is a bit of an homage to women and art, though Smith points out the limitations of the Chicago's representatives and"extends the table" as Renee Gladden writes for the back of the book.
Because of that extension, I wish she did more with animals. There is so much about food: details about cooking (often meat) sit next to sections about violence toward women. I expected more to develop when it came to the violence of hunting, butchering, shucking, and otherwise preparing meat. That particular kind of violence seemed to be just at Smith's periphery, and it, too, fits into the larger explorations about desire & entitlement, social norms, and bodies in (culinary) art.
On the whole, I thought The Leftovers was a thoughtful, elegant collection of essays. I hope to see more of Shaelyn Smith's work soon!
January 27, 2019
Too much poetry and not enough editorialization for a book that incorporated so much realism and reporting.
July 27, 2019
An essay collection with Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party as the constant, used as the starter for meditations on feminist art, herstory, violence and food.
August 19, 2024
It's a pun to say that she ate and left no crumbs
May 20, 2020
While I'm only half way through, already the books poetic prose and realistic descriptions have me hooked. Smith writes about Judy Chicago but so much more. Will be giving this book to all who love art.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews