Fitzcarraldo snaps up Barton's 'gripping' history of pornography

Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton, a "landmark" work of non-fiction interrogating the truth about porn through recorded conversations.

Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Angelique Tran Van Sang at Felicity Bryan Associates. Porn, which follows Barton’s debut Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo), is released in March 2023.

The synopsis reads: "How do we talk about porn? Why is it that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of a discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with 20 acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. 

"Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter – not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren’t saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo."

Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, which were all published by Soft Skull Press. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. 

"I’m over the moon to be working with one of the most ambitious and exciting publishers in the world," she said. "I really can’t wait to let Porn out into the world."

Testard added: "Reading Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History is a revelatory experience. It’s gripping, fascinating, thought-provoking – awkward, too, at times. It feels genuinely new, or at least unlike anything I have ever read before. Like Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women, it is a book I expect to be read for decades to come. Polly is an exceptional writer, and I am so thrilled that we will be publishing her extraordinary Porn with Fitzcarraldo Editions to follow her exceptional debut Fifty Sounds."