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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

Britain has always been a nation capable of telling itself a good story It has rarely mattered whether that story was true The story itself is usually enough: to bring the troops to the beaches, to quiet the servants in the cellar, to quell the coloniser’s unease, to ward off the threat of uprising, to clinch the referendum vote   And on a sunny day in May, the story Britain told itself was one of inclusivity and progress, eked out in gentle doses, in the form of a biracial divorced millionaire American bride for the brother of the future king Revellers camped out on the streets of Windsor, in sleeping bags not unlike those of the homeless who sleep there every night, though the former slept more soundly, without the threat of evacuation And while the nation cheered for the international couple, who had been quietly fast-tracked through Britain’s punishing immigration process, tens of thousands of UK-foreign couples denied spousal visas under the Conservatives’ draconian immigration laws will have watched the wedding on separate continents, if they could bear to watch at all While 2,640 members of the public were invited by the Royals to stand outside of St George’s Chapel, roughly the same number of men and women sat in mostly windowless cells, at Britain’s nine immigration detention centres And across Westminster, Home Office officials likely clinked champagne flutes with relief, as the nation turned its eyes away from the ongoing disgrace of the Windrush scandal to glimpse a television actress’s first wedding dress of the day: a pure white garment of double-bonded silk, held together by minute stitches, invisible, the way the workings of power always hope to be   The Modern Royals! declared fawning international magazine covers in the days and weeks that followed, seemingly unaware of the contradiction in terms For the first time since Brexit or Grenfell, the eyes of the world were on Britain, and the nation delighted in the pretty, self-flattering image the wedding conveyed If you squinted, and didn’t think too hard, Britain appeared on that day to be a nation proud to be inclusive,

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

July 2011

Comfort Station

Medbh McGuckian

poetry

July 2011

A witness has said that you raped women And brought them to the barracks to be used by the...

Interview

August 2016

Interview with Brian Evenson

J. W. McCormack

Interview

August 2016

There are at least three Brian Evensons, all of them EXCEEDINGLY IMPROBABLE. First, there’s Brian Evenson, the prolific author of...

fiction

April 2014

Biophile

Ruby Cowling

fiction

April 2014

– I’m down maybe five feet. I take a moment to thank the leaf-filled rectangle of sky, and with...

 

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