Drawing on her decades of navigating the art world, Lisa Baldissera weaves writing conventions from the visual arts with the imaginative possibilities of magic realism and autofiction in this groundbreaking collection of short fiction.

The stories in Dead Peasant reveal the fraught circumstances and neglected emotions of an underclass who toil below the glossy economies of the international high-art world, including artists and art workers. Here, characters from across centuries are haunted by war, floods, and their parental histories. An auction-house worker vomits blueberries on an art-collecting oligarch. An aspiring curator converses with Lindsay Lohan about an exhibition of horse paintings before tragedy strikes. An archivist studies planet Earth from space, reflecting on tax havens and the embattled ecology.

Through these startling, affective, incisive, and fun stories, Baldissera chronicles the unique challenges of the art world and the damage it inflicts on those struggling to get by. Like the eviscerative work of Rachel Cusk and the dark humour of Miranda July, she satirizes the neoliberal double-speak of the ‘creative economy’ and its punifiying forces, to ask, what is it, truly, that art can do now? 

US Price: $21.00 USD

•This debut story collection examines the fidelity that exists to power structures in contemporary cultural work and in working life more generally.

The book’s title comes from the ‘dead peasant’ policy, which allowed factory owners and corporations to take out insurance policies on their workers lives, to extract optimum benefit from workers, even upon their death.

Main themes include the art world and those who work in it and or consume it, vulnerability, working conditions.

The stories in this collection are a compilation of examples the author has witnessed, experienced or known, that friends and colleagues have shared over more than twenty-five years of working in the art world.

Hybrid writing across forms and genres, including fiction, satire, metafiction, art writing, and memoir.

For fans of Lydia Davis, Otessa Mosfegh, Miranda July, Rachel Cusk, Lisa Robertson, and Jacob Wren.

Will appeal to those who are familiar with art criticism, art history, museum and curatorial studies.