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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

Breath-Manifester   Each bared morning is a swell time to die, Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level Expanse of those lit and meat-eating fields, the Clouds that turn like ghost machines, the antic Tremendous woods where Pan’s breath on your heart Recharms a flame from its grey-furred ember I’ll wear my belt blazoned with Alpha Centauri, For luck, whilst you’ll surely sport that Oxfam scarf In whose puce stitch some crone has worked GI   E (Glory To The Most High) Time to die, to be Disturbed by the one re-re-repeated Word Fanfared by each time-warping bird, each fierce leaf Or pimped bud that is but love’s newest halloo Over the heads of the dead and alive, alive-O Laughing, you’ll lurch and say or missay, “only kenning what’s real Saves us from terror Wilhelm Reich” Wise words     Drones   You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s nervous system the way we use a drone or hidden camera Given what I now knew, it almost seemed possible When green tea was announced I slid outside for a smoke,   paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth Back in the conference centre, the tea- fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl that stilled her car on that night when she knew she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone   terrible to recall, a rising drone which turned her body into pixel-smoke swarming upwards and assembled anew (“like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth”) on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl When she arrived home, hours late for tea,   her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone momentarily quickened the cased owl on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke, and shivered through the symmetrical teeth of God’s lost children (tell us something new!)   who’d come here to share what little they knew I thought of the onset of DMT – that sense of deliverance into the teeth of a buzzing wind or luminous drone, mere seconds after releasing the smoke – and then of that line from Twin Peaks, “the owls   are not what they seem” I dozed, dreamt of owls sane and inviolate in all they knew, and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke And Mirrors, Carl Jung And The

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

September 2014

On the Ground

Teju Cole

Art

September 2014

I visited Palestine in early June 2014, just before the latest wave of calamity befell its people. For eight...

fiction

February 2016

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

fiction

February 2016

My back cramps on the toilet bowl. I stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down...

fiction

March 2012

Swimming Home

Deborah Levy

fiction

March 2012

‘Each morning in every family, men, women and children, if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their...

 

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