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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

Isaac Goodchrist, Esq reviewed the 48-hour letter   therefore, in the strictly professional opinion of this author, the nation’s military bodies are adequately licensed, according to the language of law and the precedent of 2001’s AUMF (Authorisation for Use of Military Force), to employ all appropriate means — including deadly persuasion — against those foreign entities (or, if necessary, non-entities) as enumerated supra, including by proxy all persons, organisations, or nations abetting those entities/non-entities, age being no object, gender being no object, race being no object, citizenship being no object, faculty of mind being no object   In sum, should lethal force be applied, the powers that be should sleep swimmingly, in terms of, at least, the language of law and the facts of precedent, soporifically perfumed by the atomised skull matter of those foreign foes (of any potential age, colour, shape, or content)   Goodchrist signed the letter   His signature had the aspect of a string of bulbous grapes on the vine The page was fat stock, flecked with colour, with a smell a little bleachy and audible flap Against the dark grained wood of Goodchrist’s kitchen table, its handsome ivory popped Goodchrist recapped his pen, which he’d stolen from a Blockbusters, circa 1992, and he watched the ink sink, stain, barely bleed, and set; then, with plain horror, he looked forward and came to slow terms with the breakfast before him He thought, So food has come to this   Breakfast, Goodchrist was discovering, was stale cereal, served to him — by him — in the bile-green, becrusted dog bowl He found he had already conceded a lump to his mouth He chewed, wondered How he had arrived at supping from this lowly vessel was mystery, as were most of his other domestic movements for the past two feverish days, during which time he’d composed the letter As was lately usual, the composition period had been spent in fugue The stress of his job was wrenching the fingertips of his senses off their ledge with increasing spur In the pit below, mind was cloaca, but for the legalese flushing through   Goodchrist was a war lawyer It was his

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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fiction

June 2015

Hollow Heart

Viola Di Grado

TR. Antony Shugaar

fiction

June 2015

2011   I. In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself.   On July 23, at 3:29 in the...

fiction

September 2013

Seiobo There Below

László Krasznahorkai

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

September 2013

1 KAMO-HUNTER Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the...

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September 2015

Immigrant Freedoms

Benjamin Markovits

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September 2015

My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the...

 

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