Lauren Elkin – författare

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAYA New York Times Notable Book of 2017The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York.Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.Called “deliciously spiky and seditious” by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

From the acclaimed author of Flaneuse and Art Monsters, a fierce, insistent, ecstatic investigation of the female voice, its power and vulnerabilities, and the ways women sing and speak their way through the world.For millennia, women's raised voices have been called unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Singing women were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death.A vocal break is where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers-from one thing to another. What can be made in this space of transition? Lauren Elkin draws on her own experiences as a young soprano in the 1990s as well as showcasing a full-throated, full range of other singers, including Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyonce, FKA twigs, and Billie Eilish. Looking closely at the way power and identity shape our voices, she immerses readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to folk, punk, and opera.As she seamlessly blends cultural history, criticism, memoir, and feminist manifesto, Elkin lays out how women have used their voices to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism, sexism, and the forces that attempt to keep them quiet. What makes women's singing so powerful-to the point at which others feel the need to control or manipulate it? Vocal Break is Elkin's insistent, joyous call: Girls to the front, NOW!

A Best Book of the Year: Vanity Fair and the New StatesmanA New York Times Best Book of the Year (So Far)A Most-Anticipated Book: The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, BBC, Marie Claire, Frieze, Literary Hub, The Millions, Our Culture, i news"Smart and steamy . . . A beguiling puzzle—and a deep intellectual dive.”—Associated Press“Scaffolding joins books by Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy, and as an erudite lust quadrilateral interested in ethical quandaries, it may put you in mind of Sally Rooney.”—Anthony Cummins, The Guardian The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, ?nds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is ?nishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their ?rst child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.Two couples, ?fty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, ?delity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the di?culty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

Brought to you by Penguin.A dazzlingly original reassessment of women''s stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them.For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it?Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous and Maggie Nelson, Lauren Elkin demonstrates her power as a cultural critic, weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers - from Julia Margaret Cameron''s photography to Kara Walker''s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell''s portraits to Eva Hesse''s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann''s body art to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha''s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE - and shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political.''Destined to become a new classic''.©2023 Lauren Elkin (P)2023 Penguin Audio