Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers -- Deborah Levy
A novel about love in digital spaces that takes the time to breathe, exhaling into the muggy air of real places. A bereft protagonist is consoled by the energy of philosophical fragments and messy objects. Walsh has surgical expertise in the dissection of online excitements and misdirections but puts us in the sensual world of Dior lipsticks and perfecto jackets. The result is bracing. It's a new real where our emotions are always betwixt and between our devices and what feels like the ache in our heart -- Sherry Turkle * [for Break.up] *
Original and breathtaking -- Chris Kraus * [for Vertigo] *
Her work trades on the literary genres of the miniature-short stories, essays, even postcards-reminiscent of Marcel Schwob, Clarice Lispector, Roland Barthes, and Lydia Davis -- Paris review * [for Vertigo] *
Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery... boldly intellectual work -- Financial Times
Her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation -- Heidi Julavits, New York Times
This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualization. -- Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn't miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is good to think with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era. -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse
Skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains. -- Juliet Jacques, author of Trans
The internet is all about girls-and is an impossible place to be one. Girl Online writes its way through that dilemma with critical insight and creative moxie. It's a really good book for anyone who has ever tried to have a gender-especially on the internet. -- McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead
Neither a mirror nor a lamp, the screen offers no specular high or illuminating epiphany. Yet, it provides a set of immaterialities for the switch up of identity and personhood, imaginary spaces from which to prompt far-reaching reflection and the timed fantasy of emancipation. Joanna Walsh delivers a new batch of historical screen memories in a constant remix of desire and memory, erasure and fear. The text rotates into literary and theoretical analyses, tech labs and artistic sites, propelled by touching autobiographemes that explode and mutate according to a digital logic that holds subjectivity to a new standard of captivity. Taking off from AI Alice Through the Looking Glass, Walsh calls up crucial works of Derrida, Chantal Ackermann, Luce Irigaray, Kathy Acker, and other innovators of shredded identity, jamming on the theoretical fine print of our internet contracts and reversible selfhood. -- Avital Ronell, author of Stupidity
In this profound and moving account of what it's like to be a girl online, Joanna Walsh guides readers through unwritten terms and conditions women face when they're on the internet, how they're forced to commodify themselves, and effectively pay for the space they take up 'with accounts of personal experience.' * Business Insider *
In this book of essays in alternative forms, including programming language, tweets, and lyric prose, Joanna Walsh explores what it means to be a woman on this thing called the internet. Expect some philosophizing on tech, identity, selfies, and social media. * Nylon *
Joins a growing genre of writing, including fiction and nonfiction, that attempts to articulate the way it feels to be online. -- Eliza Goodpasture * 3:AM Magazine *
In a series of meditations and 'thought experiments' exploring motherhood, blogs, women's writing, and the meaning of work both on and off the screen, Walsh examines the relationship between looking and being looked at, watching and being watched, that is inherent to both the internet and femininity. -- Rhian Sasseen * The Paris Review *
Any woman who's ever dealt with reply guys gone feral, dogpiling, doxxing, or dick pics in her DMs knows one thing: It's hard to be a woman on the internet. In Girl Online, Joanna Walsh explores our relationship to the web - what we sacrifice to have an internet presence, how our identities change online, and what we receive in return. -- K.W. Colyard * Bustle *
