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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

IV     Every space is too tight for me I move around, I jump, I fling myself and yet I’m still inside that one space which is too tight for me, unbearably small, although at times it is only exactly just a bit too tight, and it is exactly then, when it is exactly just a bit too tight, that it is the most unbearable; I jump and I’m still inside something, whose dimensions could be called redundantly inabundant, because it is not simply a question of dimensions but rather that in the moment when I jump, and I am inside that space, I am immediately caught, the space has caught me, the space into which I leapt unguarded, and it is not that I’m not cautious enough, I am cautious enough, maybe even unduly so, but that it’s all the same where I jump, it’s certain that I’ll end up in a space that is too tight for me, at times only exactly just a bit too tight, but amazingly very often just that, unendurable, I feel that space coiling around me like a cage no matter where I move, I immediately reach the end, in fact hardly do I move at all before the end of that space reaches me, I say, it is so much like being in a cage, as if all I could ever do is jump in a cage, and I can’t do anything else, I have to jump, however if I jump I immediately end up in that space which, as I say, is often maddeningly tight, I feel more or less not as if I were jumping into a square wire cage, or even worse into a brick-shaped one, but at such times I feel that I have got myself into a space that has been measured exactly for me, that’s what I think, that it is exactly as big as I am, and that is the most maddening thing of all, because I

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

December 2011

The Pitch

Minashita Kiriu

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

Dripping excitedly from my earlobes And falling over my crowded routines A rain of Lucretius’ atoms Is just beginning...

poetry

March 2015

Coup & Bell Curve

Elizabeth Willis

poetry

March 2015

COUP   Mallarmé’s gambling astonished everyone even the poets   An acre of paper sold down a river whose...

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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...

 

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