Essayist and cultural critic Philippa Snow has announced the publication of Snow Business, a collection of reviews, essays and flash fiction which she wrote between 2019 and 2025.
Snow Business is currently only available to subscribers of ISOLARII, the avant-garde media company publishing the book, but it will be on sale as a standalone purchase in June.
According to ISOLARRI’s description, Snow Business “articulates with majestic precision the thorny unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. Kim Kardashian’s novel Dollhouse is just as much a work of ‘autofiction’ as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating the Great Gatsby; and Francis Bacon still eludes everyone.”
Announcing the release Instagram, Snow wrote: “good news for people who like very tiny books, writing about films/reality TV, God/S&M, the 00s tyranny of the girlboss, and fully absurd titles”. She also posted a photo which shows how small the book really is: you could easily fit it into the palm of your hand or slip into a back pocket.
A perennial Dazed favourite and longtime contributor, Snow is one of Britain’s sharpest and most interesting critics, with bylines in Artforum, AnOther, Vogue, Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books and more. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence (2022), is a critical study of self-harm as a form of art and entertainment, taking in everything from mass-market entertainment like Jackass and Buster Keaton to transgressive conceptual artists like Marina Abramović and Gina Pane.
Trophy Bodies: On the Celebrity as Art Object (2024), her most recent book, is an illustrated essay which considers whether iconic celebrities can be considered self-authored artworks in and of themselves. The Terrible Things I Have To Do to Be Me (2025), due to be published this July, is a series of interconnected essays about femininity and fame, from the golden age of Hollywood to the Instagram era. Each essay pairs together female stars from different eras, including Anna Nicole Smith and Marilyn Monroe, Lindsay Lohan and Elizabeth Taylor, and Pamela Anderson and Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey, a trans model and actress who rose to stardom in the 1970s.