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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

Although I had landed two hours before, I was drinking wine and not coffee as I waited for a friend, a newly credentialed lawyer, to explain his concerns about civil liberties in his country At my back, shrieks rose My mistake had been remembering the yearly transformation of the Bassin de La Villette as festive This visit to a café on the canal’s bank had been my suggestion Floating dive bars lift anchor, replaced by kayaks and bulky platforms within which it’s possible to pilot a child’s plastic boat or, last year’s innovation, to swim A whine reached us from a zipline A boat whose deep pink sail bore a logo for the 2024 Olympics rotated slowly, moored unstably to two buoys The city’s bid was in Meanwhile, temporary metal fences cordoned off the canal, and last August, to walk alongside it, one had to submit to a guard rifling through one’s bag To another American, I pointed out Doric columns, the Villette Rotunda, built in the eighteenth century as a tollbooth in the city’s wall Like a tree, Paris has grown in concentric rings; this wall, where taxes used to be exacted, was succeeded by a looping railway, by the Périphérique highway, and, most recently, by a scheme called Grand Paris, which will incorporate some of the suburbs into an extended Métro web and administrative system So unpopular were the taxes – and, by extension, the Rotunda – that its architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was imprisoned by revolutionaries in 1793 The American had heard of Ledoux’s dream, a city of three thousand inhabitants laid out radially around a salt works that the architect had built He sketched buildings whose geometries cross Neoclassical and ziggurat – Space-Age avant la lettre A vast orb sunk among mausoleums would serve as a cemetery As with the factory, which centred a director’s house the architect called a ‘temple of surveillance’, the design emphasised sightlines The panopticon was not, for Ledoux, incompatible with utopia On the contrary, in Chaux city, the architecture would refine the thinking of the citizenry[1] They would have nothing to hide Michel

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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Art

July 2014

(holes)

Alice Hattrick

Kristina Buch

Art

July 2014

There are many ways to make sense of the world, through language, speech and text, but also the senses...

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...

fiction

November 2013

Special School

Iphgenia Baal

fiction

November 2013

 

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