Skin [Hardcover]

Skin is the border of our body and, as such, it is that through which we relate to others but also what separates us from them. Through skin, we speak: when we display it, when we tan it, when we tattoo it, or when we mute it by covering it with clothes. Skin exhibits social relationships, displays power and the effects of power, explains many things about who we are, how others perceive us and how we exist in the world. And when it gets sick, it turns us into monsters.

In Skin, Sergio del Molino speaks of these monsters in history and literature, whose lives have been tormented by bad skin: Stalin secretly taking a bath in his dacha, Pablo Escobar getting up late and shutting himself in the shower, Cyndi Lauper performing a commercial for a medicine promising relief from skin disease, John Updike sunburned in the Caribbean, Nabokov writing to his wife from exile, Everything would be fine, if it werent for the damned skin. As a psoriasis sufferer, Sergio del Molino includes himself in this gallery of monsters through whose stories he delves into the mysteries of skin. What is for some a badge of pride and for others a source of anguish and shame, skin speaks of us and for us when we dont speak with words.

Gratitudes and Debts


Witches Dont Egg-sist

The Devil Card

A Swimming Pool in Sochi

The Magic Mountain

The Prettiest Girl in Sandy Ground

A Very Brief History of Racism

The Middle Ages of The Skin

When the Working Day is Done

Conversations With a Stone King

The Bosss Comb

My Greek

Impure

Butterfly in Basque

Habit

Cogent and insightful&lló½