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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School, Wesley Loramar would wait in cubicles at the public lavatory at the beginning of Pier Road, Kinsale, aged sixteen, with the look of the bored cherub in Raphael’s The Madonna of the San Sisto   Kinsale, with its whaling frame houses, was where the pirate, Anne Bonny, was from   Anne’s lawyer father, William Cormac, got a servant girl, Peg Brennan, pregnant The three fled to Charleston, North Carolina where William became a plantation owner   When she was thirteen Anne stabbed a servant girl At sixteen she married and went off with James Bonny, a pirate On sea she had a homosexual companion, Pierre Bouspeut   She decided to elope with another pirate, John ‘Calico’ Rackham On the ship Revenge she met Mark Read who was really Mary Read and they became lovers   The ship was captured October 1720, the men executed, the two women spared because they claimed pregnancy   Wesley, wheaten and auburn hair, Titian red eyebrows, body like a military road, hoping to be picked up, would be seen hitchhiking in school uniform on the Inishshannon Road, three miles North West of Kinsale, close to Dunderrow, not far from the Bandon River   Dunderrow – fortress of oak plain   There is an American chemical factory there now   Coins left by Elizabeth’s forces before the Battle of Kinsale 1601, have been found here   In yesteryears Mrs Harrington would travel by pony and trap from Kinsale each day to teach here, picking up pupils on the way   Her pony was cared for while she was teaching by the Bowen family   A man named Billy the Butlerowned the local manor just prior to Miss Harrington’s career   Bankruptcy had dogged successive owners of that manor and he too went bankrupt   Wesley would be seen coming out of Dunderrow wood, which had the sow-like smell of lesser celandine in spring – slight moustache like the down inside the foxglove – where he’d lain with workers from the chemical factory He was like Orpheus who stole their husbands from the Thracian women   Some said he’d been doing this since he’d worn the grey

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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July 2013

Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus...

poetry

May 2017

Two Poems

Vala Thorodds

poetry

May 2017

THROUGH FLIGHT   For a moment we are borne into the air and then down.   It is there, behind...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

 

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