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91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage).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

At the beginning of From the Beast to the Blonde, her study of fairy tales and their tellers, Marina Warner recounts a Kenyan fable in which an ailing Sultan’s wife is restored to health by being fed ‘meat of the tongue’ – tales, stories, jokes and songs A belief in the central, sometimes life-giving importance of storytelling is the woof which weaves all Warner’s work together, both fiction and critical works; the warp, on the other hand, could be almost anything which catches her magpie-like eye, from the Cumaean Sibyl to Jurassic Park    Born in London to an Italian mother and an English bookseller father, Warner’s early childhood was spent in Cairo and Belgium, after which she was educated in England, firstly at a convent school and then at Oxford Beginning her career as a journalist, Warner’s writing encompasses myth, fairy tales, symbolism, the visual arts and feminine archetypes Her first book, The Dragon Empress (1972), a biography of the Chinese Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, was followed by a study of another iconic female figure, the Virgin Mary, in Alone Of All Her Sex (1976) Subsequent critical works have addressed topics such as the female form in myth and sculpture (Monuments and Maidens, 1985), fairy tales (From the Beast to the Blonde, 1994) and ideas of spirit and soul (Phantasmagoria, 2006) She has also written several novels and short story collections, many of which also draw on older myths and tales, mixing the mundane with the magical; Indigo (1992), for instance, reworks Shakespeare’s The Tempest, while a story from mermaids in The Basement (1993) reimagines the temptation of Eve by a snakily persuasive saleswoman in a supermarket Her most recent work, Stranger Magic, is a study of the Arabian Nights, which will be published later this year She is currently writing a novel inspired by her father’s bookshop in Egypt, entitled Inventory of a Life Mislaid   I meet Marina Warner at her home in north London, a wonderful bibliophilic Aladdin’s cave of a house There are richly coloured rugs on the floors, an old grandfather clock in the corner, and

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

feature

February 2014

Only Responsible to Their Art: Heilan and the Chinese Avant-Garde

Chen Wei

TR. Tu Qiang

feature

February 2014

Heilan was established for a simple reason: over the past twenty years, there has not emerged a single medium...

Art

Issue No. 10

Patterns

Christian Newby

Art

Issue No. 10

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Lidija Dimkovska

Sara Nović

Interview

March 2017

I met Lidija Dimkovska at the Twin Cities Book Festival in October, fleetingly, and completely by accident. I had...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required