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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

I first became aware of Ariana Reines’s work through her early poetry collection The Cow (2006), which went on to win the prestigious Alberta Prize I was struck by its focus on abjection, female filth and the damage we inflict on animal bodies Reading that collection marked the start of a full on, visceral engagement with Reines’s work The expansiveness and courage of her voice has helped to build my sense of what poetry might be capable of at its best – visionary, politically engaged, wrestling with the point at which body and spirit meet   Reines’s books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page Her work experiments with form and structure, often using long lines and unorthodox punctuation, alongside a rangy, conversational and slangy diction – all of which leads to a sense of delicious intimacy with this rich and dynamic poetic voice It is poetry I continue to teach, read and respond to, a touchstone of inventive poetics   Reines was born in Salem, Massachusetts, lending her what she describes as a ‘heavy Salem lineage’ The awareness of female agency as ‘threat’ is ever present in her books; that strange mixture of a power that is both terror and desire As a poet, playwright and translator, Reines is concerned with the complications of female experience and liberation and how these meet the knowledge of the body, and in excavating the difficulties and strange pleasures of contemporary sexual and romantic relationships She writes stringently about the death-cult of late capitalism, and its chaotic imaginary Reines is also interested in the occult, and the ways in which it might open up new kinds of spiritual and poetic understanding This is most clearly seen in her alchemical work Mercury, which explores symbolism and transcendent experience It re-appears in the titanic ambition of her newly published collection A Sand Book, which explores Jewish identity, spiritual transformation, and the poison of climate collapse – interrogating the space between the divine and the self The book is both a

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

July 2012

The Pits

FMJ Botham

fiction

July 2012

Sometimes he would emerge from his bedroom around midday and the sun would be more or less bright, or...

poetry

Issue No. 8

The Cloud of Knowing

John Ashbery

poetry

Issue No. 8

There are those who would have paid that. The amount your eyes bonded with (O spangled home) will have...

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April 2012

Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe

Will Stone

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April 2012

Que nos caravanes s’avancent Vers ce lieu marqué par le sang Une plaie au coeur de la France Y...

 

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