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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

I One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room She moved aside the coffee table and put the mattress in front of the TV Just a few weeks before, Buzz had done the same in his apartment so that he could stay up late and watch movies on his used tube TV One night, he’d arranged Heather naked in different positions on the mattress to take pictures of her Heather had secretly felt like Rose from Titanic, but knew that if she said it out loud, Buzz would dump her Heather both liked and disliked the feeling She’d felt subversive allowing herself to be objectified and observed so closely She also felt like a cheeseball thinking of herself as Rose and not as an obscure gamine at the Chelsea Hotel circa 1973   After the breakup, Heather moved her mattress to feel closer to Buzz, to sleep in the same position he was sleeping in But she also moved it to be closer to the television and further away from the bottomlessness of her hysterics She was crying all the time, and she knew the sadness was disproportionate to the romance She cried in the bathroom stall at work, in traffic on the way home In the evenings, she sat on her porch and watched the sun set at the far end of Augusta Avenue, crying into a jam jar full of whiskey, proud of the tableau she had created   The time had come to cauterise the wound Heather made up her bed on the floor, sat down with her cat, whose name was Fuzz, and turned on the television Last time she had had her heart broken, she and the cat had watched the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation She looked at the cat now What would it be this time?   II Sometime in the last decade I began watching TV again At first, the shows came on DVDs through the mail Then they came through the languid Internet of the late-naughts Now, they come full and robust and easy; streaming is the word

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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Interview

March 2015

Interview with Jonathan Meades

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

March 2015

The television broadcasts of Jonathan Meades are marked by a surreal humour, a polymathic breadth of knowledge, and a...

Art

March 2011

Gabriel Orozco: Cosmic Matter and Other Leftovers

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

March 2011

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’. As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a...

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September 2014

The Mediatisation of Contemporary Writing

Nick Thurston

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September 2014

Trying to figure out what marks contemporary literature as contemporary is a deceptively complicated job because the concept of...

 

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