Mailing List


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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

feature

Issue No. 8

Barking From the Margins: On écriture féminine

Lauren Elkin

feature

Issue No. 8

 I. Two moments in May May 2, 2011. The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk...

Malcolm Starke died today who rang us most nights so late that it could only be him He’d been there forever sinking audible coins into the payphone at the flats where he was watchman and they tried to fire him once for being sockless Greeting me with Alasdair’s name or him with mine he would catch us on the line and in a voice of infuriating softness tell us about Turkey the times he went to Turkey and the National Gallery which is on Trafalgar Square We’d lurch and charge around in absolute quiet sometimes laying the receiver on a chair, drawing long daggers into our hearts cocking our necks on invisible rope slashing our throats with giant swords bellowing fuck off with our huge silent teeth For birthdays he knew us apart and on scraps of scissored foolscap drew us into trains and carriages drew us in turbans and pyjamas drew us Turkish, presumably No likeness at all, covered in tipex, I kept them all I have every one They were always two days early never the same he’d never met either of us But you knew him at university You kept inviting him round after he was arrested for talking to girls and embarrassing people And though you sometimes seemed the least patient of us three, though you’d thank us when we’d told him you weren’t at home, you raised us in a house where Malcolm Starke might ring at any moment, where he was never far away and he was ours He felt that nuclear waste could be disposed of by firing it into the sun He felt that a sinister committee had taken remote control of his valuable brain That sometimes they didn’t ‘play fair’ with him He

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

feature

Issue No. 2

Lauren Elkin

feature

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...

READ NEXT

Art

October 2013

At the Tate Britain: Art Under Attack

Joe Moshenska

Art

October 2013

Iconoclasts have never known quite what to do with the ruined fragments that they leave behind. If we imagine...

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

poetry

Issue No. 3

Two Poems

Rebecca Wolff

poetry

Issue No. 3

I approach a purchase adore my children— back away— that they revere ugliness the rainbow bag that holds a...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required