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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

Towards the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart was practicing psychoanalysis in New York, and was sick and tired of it He lived in a nice apartment, with windows facing his neighbours, through which everyone had nice views of each other He did yoga, read books on Zen Buddhism, and toyed with the idea of joining a hippie commune, but didn’t dare Failing that, he wore bell-bottoms and a beard, which made him look less like a depressed bourgeois than an out-of-work actor As a therapist, he was resolutely nondirective If an obese, virginal and compulsively sadistic patient told him whilst on the couch that he’d like to rape and murder a little girl, his professional ethics compelled him to repeat in a calm voice, ‘You’d like to rape and murder a little girl?’ An elusive question mark disappearing into ellipses Long silence The absence of judgement But, in reality, how he really wanted to reply was: ‘Go on, then! If what really turns you on is to rape and murder a little girl, stop boring me with your fantasy: do it!’ He held himself back, obviously, from saying such terrible things, but they obsessed him more and more Like everyone else, he forbade himself from living out his fantasies even though they were more or less harmless – not the sort of thing that got you sent to prison, like his sadistic patient would be if he ever let himself go What he would have liked, for example, was to sleep with Arlene, his colleague Jake Epstein’s wife with the sumptuous breasts, who lived on the same floor in his apartment building He had the feeling she wouldn’t be opposed to the idea, but as a faithful, married man, a responsible adult, he left the thought to bubble away in the backwater of his daydreams   So his life passed, calm and dull, until the day when, after a particularly boozy evening, Luke spotted a die, a boring old die for playing games, lying on the carpet and suddenly the idea came to him to roll it, and to do

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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Art

March 2013

Strangely Ordinary: Ron Mueck's art of the uncanny

Anouchka Grose

Art

March 2013

Since the Stone Age, people have been concerned with the problem of how to represent life.   Cave paintings...

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September 2014

Paris at Night

Matthew Beaumont

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September 2014

The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel...

poetry

September 2011

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

I have my hands out in front of me. I’m lightly patting down everything I come across. I somehow...

 

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