Everything for Everyone:
An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072
with M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi
“Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien are changing the game of what the novel is and what the novel can be. Much as James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Imani Perry did with the epistolary form in non-fiction, Everything for Everyone uses speculative oral history to expand and explode the limits of what fiction can do. Their imagined oral histories from many parties help us understand the present from many possible points of view in the future looking back, like Rashômon meets House of Leaves. In Everything for Everyone, binaries (of male-versus-female, fiction-versus-non-fiction, past-versus-future) are irrelevant compared to something much more interesting and important that Abdelhadi and O’Brien seek to illustrate: truth, and the way we might find liberation in it.”—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass
In 2067, M.E. O’Brien interviewed Miss Kelley about her key role in the Insurrection of Hunts Point, broadly recognized as the launching moment of the New York Commune. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, as part of the New York Oral History Commune Project, continued to interview people about their roles and reflections on the uprising. “Now” on the twentieth anniversary of the revolution we are pleased to welcome O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi as they present a collection of interviews they have just published as Everything for Everyone (Common Notions, 2022).
Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.
“A really fascinating glimpse into a future New York City after a revolution has transformed the US and much of the world into an antifascist, communist utopia…necessary and empowering, providing a hypothetical foundation for an ideal future.“—Buzzfeed
“Charts dizzying, delightful new futures for science fiction, urban planning, and engaged social practice. I spent 15 years as a community organizer and never dreamed of seeing something that so bravely, brilliantly combines liberational nonfiction and radical documentary with the exuberance of the best speculative storytelling.“ —Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving
“Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s tall tales of the future draw on real experiences of the past and present. The book’s multiple narratives, equal parts hope and pain, merge into a prayer for collective survival and for the eventual flourishing of our powers of love and invention. Voices from as-yet-unlived lives instill faith that our becoming is not yet done. Abdelhadi and O’Brien have created a vivid image of the possibility that we will one day make a home of the world.” —Hannah Black
“The special magic of Everything for Everyone is that it combines the genres of the oral history interview with speculative utopian fiction. Oral histories can show how in their everyday lives ordinary people can make the world. Utopian fiction can show the worlds we might want to be making. Every cook, or sex worker, can govern. And this is the life they might build from the ruins of this civilization, such as it is. Such a pleasure to feel one could be making the world over with them.” —McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street
M. E. O'Brien is a psychotherapist who writes at the intersection of communist theory, trans liberation, LGBTQ social-movement studies, and feminism. Brooklyn-based O’Brien is a co-editor of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism, and previously worked with the NYC Trans Oral History Project.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist based in Chicago. She has been involved in the movement for Palestinian liberation, Black Lives Matter, counter-surveillance and abolitionism, marxist-feminist mobilization, and workplace struggles. She co-coordinates the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds community by and for queer Muslims.
Everything for Everyone is the first work of fiction to be published by Brooklyn-based radical book publisher Common Notions.