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Lauren Elkin
Lauren Elkin is most recently the author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage). Her previous book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto/FSG) was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Frieze, among others. Her next book, Art Monsters, will be out in July 2023 (Chatto/FSG). She lives in London.

Articles Available Online


Maria Gainza’s ‘Optic Nerve’

Book Review

May 2019

Lauren Elkin

Book Review

May 2019

In his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, on the pleasures of philosophy, and of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in particular, Brian Massumi writes:  ...

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Issue No. 8

Barking From the Margins: On écriture féminine

Lauren Elkin

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Issue No. 8

 I. Two moments in May May 2, 2011. The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk...

POET AS CYBORG PORNSTAR   It starts with the turn Their slender edges, the slow reveal from margin to bombshell, the hormonal show of the real: whatever it is, you know it’s fucking hot I promise, I would do anything to get you off I am peeling my skin 4 u Let’s talk about it: how we fabricate intimacy, the wet scapes of the world scolded back to rigid, flashy                                                         direction Don’t                                                         you think every hero must grow to love their algorithm? Chemical action without consequences, good feeling, bad feeling—young, dumb, and full of poems! With her long French tips and how their bodies work Outsource ur erotics to the moneymakers This month, we are proud to be partnering with Donna Haraway in building a new kind of human-shaped sex robot who wants to write poems Would a friend catch the dog-ear, unreadable script, whir of systems, artificially leathered voice—       POEM AS ZERESHK POLLO   The white owner of the Persian restaurant says they keep wages low to avoid gentrifying the area with higher prices I think of the recipe from the place I used to wait: zereshk (barberries, or you can use dried cranberries if you can’t find barberries), saffron (use yellow food colouring as an alternative) Keep them guessing You are a classical text in the emperor’s encoded vision—sour red berries reclining on a carpet of chicken thighs, jewels set in broth like simmering gold If European culture generally has digested the Orient, what am I but a ferment of exotic things? A dish, a soul, a curated image—every time I chop and fry an onion I have to wonder what it means for my place in the market So what do you think? I mean, of all these grains, letters, this hot tahdig, this oil fallen into syntactic place, this formal glaze beneath which bubbles the threat that in some mouths even this could tell an unintended joke? Every way I look I can feel the cool twist, the crisp euphemism of middle-class taste, and I wonder how much this too will sell for How much would you pay? How good will it look on your plate?     GHAZAL                                                               My eyes were very stop look smell

Contributor

August 2014

Lauren Elkin

Contributor

August 2014

Lauren Elkin is most recently the author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK...

The End of Francophonie: The Politics of French Literature

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Issue No. 2

Lauren Elkin

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Issue No. 2

I. We were a couple of minutes late for the panel we’d hoped to attend. The doors were closed and there was a surly-looking...

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fiction

January 2017

Oh You

Keller Easterling

fiction

January 2017

You won’t be able to do it. It is a call, and it is something you only know how...

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November 2017

Small White Monkeys

Sophie Collins

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November 2017

Small white monkeys stretch around in the dirt beneath a tree but do not get dirty. They pick themselves...

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February 2014

Another Way of Thinking

Scott Esposito

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February 2014

I. There is no substitute for that moment when a book places into our mind thoughts we recognise as our...

 

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