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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

There was a sound coming out of her The stenographer was recording it It was dark in the small room and she could see the sound waves on the screen pulsing Was it a good pulse? It was hard to say Was it louder now she was bigger? People called it getting taller but she was getting bigger She was growing in perfect proportion It wasn’t like she was stretching The tallness was coming from a push that seemed to come from her feet Her feet would get bigger and then her ankles would get bigger and all the way up her body Unnoticeable to the human eye But often she would wake up and sit up and she would know she was taller Maybe it was happening equally over time, maybe it was happening in spurts She had been to an endocrinologist She suspected they all had Hormones made you grow and something had turned on all their hormones Everyone was trying to find out why It was a multimillion-dollar business because it was throwing things off in an uncomfortable way All the people that were getting bigger were normal people None of the rich or powerful people were getting taller None of them So when her boss had to tell her she was making a hash of things That maybe she needed to get better at her job – her boss found it hard because of her size Her boss had complained that he felt threatened She wasn’t sure why her boss would feel that way, at least she didn’t want her boss to feel that way She wanted her boss to feel comfortable around her But he was right to be frightened She was bigger than him by a lot and she was strong That was a secret she was keeping She was so much stronger She’d broken a couple of things None of the powerful people wanted to feel like this so a lot of the powerful people were putting a lot of money into research – to try and stop it Just stop it

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

November 2013

The Past is a Foreign Country

Natasha Hoare

Art

November 2013

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The immortal first line to L. P. Hartley’s...

poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

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February 2011

Novelty and revolt: why there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution

Nadia Khomami

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February 2011

The world is seeing an increase in the use of social media as a tool for mobilisation and protest....

 

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