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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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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...

  MODES OF BEING   A new hobby of mine is repeating a word until it strays from its centre of meaning, so risibly            alive (an egg tumbling through grass) unburdened of itself, beyond thinking I lead a rich and duplicitous life on the ward I’m fed well All the residents know me, their cherubic faces assuaging my fears in the midst of some sinister music   I’m happy enough letting the television play, allowing sunlight its languorous dominion   In the cool phosphorescence of these bus stop days (my dust rising and returning) comes feeling       CRYPSIS   Stop the gunboats! Lately I’m relishing being a strange fungus in the meaning of the hall unmolested, my brain a razed monastery of thoughts a prized gourd at the funeral of verbs   I’ve only growth as a means of mobility Here beneath the smashed, chaotic flagstones a specious beach   bestrewn with slogans, garbled soundbites cracked versions of ourselves exhumed in sunlight in a tableau of what’s real   What to tell you? That it’s enough to make beautiful things to love redly despite the expiry date of dogs   That the mind blooms serenely, in virtue of itself: a feted puffball   of which these poems are the spores       THREE OR FOUR HILLS AND A CLOUD   Morning Time to crank up the machine without which this wouldn’t be possible   (You gesture towards some tangerines, a laptop, a fresh pot of coffee)   This still life cannot excite me today, will not sate nor diminish this longing to escape this life for jungle scenes to play swingball with vigour, meet monkeys   Bad example, but you know what I mean about torpor, the bureaucrat’s burden, so often fishing in stagnant pools when each door opens onto salvation   In the next life (whoever you are) I’ll be good, like the spring, if not better I’ll wade out into flowerful fields and disappear I’ll see you tomorrow  

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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poetry

February 2014

Two Poems from A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

Derek Jarman

poetry

February 2014

To mark the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, Test Centre has produced a facsimile edition of his sole,...

Interview

Issue No. 14

Interview with Hal Foster

Chris Reitz

Interview

Issue No. 14

HAL FOSTER’S WORK FOLLOWS in the tradition of the modernist art critic-historian, a public intellectual whose reflection on, and...

poetry

September 2011

First Blimp

Joshua Trotter

poetry

September 2011

Removing colour from my thoughts, I formed a winter ball. I threw it. The dead were uncounted. There was...

 

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