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10 Vintage Non-Fiction Recommendations

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Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

Art Monsters

'Destined to become a new classic'

'Juxtaposes ideas, images, language, in a vivid collage that invites us to look more deeply'

'Soaring and vivid ... it left me giddy with possibility'

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat 

'A fascinating re-visioning and re-imagining of women artists who have used their bodies in all sorts of creative, subversive ways.'

'You won't find anything like this history, told in this way, anywhere else'

'Lauren Elkin's exhaustive, incisive re-readings of feminist writing and art across several centuries prove that the questions raised in these works are far from resolved. In fact, they're more timely than ever. The book seems destined to become a new classic. Making a passionate case for the monstrosity entailed in all acts of creation, Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.'

'Soaring and vivid, the experience of reading Art Monsters is like watching a lightning storm at night, each chapter a bolt of light. A remarkable twinning of intellect and brightest scholarship, it left me giddy with possibility.'

'Lauren Elkin has the nerve to defend the guilty, fight tooth and claw for long abandoned causes while making heroines out of trouble makers. Her book makes you take sides, change sides, change back and sometimes shout out loud with furious indignation but you won't find anything like this history, told in this way, anywhere else.'

'Elkin's authority as a cultural critic springs from her signature style of curious questioning. Rather than imposing her conclusions on the reader, she juxtaposes ideas, images, language, in a vivid collage that invites us to look more deeply. Never linear - because life isn't - but perpetually moving, in both senses of the word.'

'A fascinating re-visioning and re-imagining of women artists who have used their bodies in all sorts of creative, subversive ways. Lauren Elkin provides fresh insight into more familiar names and works, and brings plenty of less well-known ones to light, taking us through more than a century of women who boldly took on the world.'

A lively and vibrant account of feminist art that articulates the everyday experience of having a body... [a] superb book

Insightful, provocative and at times heartbreaking

Art Monsters joins a larger conversation about monstrousness and art... provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently

Compulsively readable... Art Monsters is a remarkably joyful book in which the senses are tested and explored, and the boundaries of disgust and desire redrawn

A heavy read at times, but this is not a book for taking the easy route - and is all the more rewarding for it

Elkin&rsquo;s book is a self-confessed monster&hellip; [and] is also her personal quest to become immoderate and unruly&hellip; where she dos cut loose and take flight, it is intoxicating to be carried along in her slipstream

A must-have resource for discovering influential art work of marginalised women reporting on life in the abject

'Destined to become a new classic' Chris Kraus 
 
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. 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 – Lauren Elkin shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political. 
 
‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’ Deborah Levy

Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Flaneuse

Part memoir, part biography, part cultural meander, an irresistibly intelligent literary walk through the lives of wandering women: about how, by putting one foot in front of the other, we can sometimes stumble upon different routes in our lives

An uplifting, gender-bending critique of how women negotiate public space

Deliciously spiky and seditious, she takes her readers on a rich, intelligent and lively meander through cultural history, biography, literary criticism, urban topography and memoir… I defy anyone to read this celebratory study and not feel inspired to take to the streets in one way or another.

Well researched and larded with examples, this picaresque account of a picaresque longing successfully paints women back into the city... Elkin reboots the appetite to go walking and thinking in the city, which can only be a good thing.

Flâneuse is not simply a reclaiming of space, but also of a suppressed intellectual and cultural history. Finding ways to reframe images of women walking and to reverse male gazes, Flâneuse builds on recent work by Rebecca Solnit and the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, among others, with striking intellectual vigour and clear, enrapturing prose.

The thoughtful urban stroller Lauren Elkin is a self-appointed heir to Woolf's 'street haunter'. A memoir, a travelogue and an eminently likeable work of literary criticism, Flaneuse is more like a song sung under Elkin’s breath. [...] At its best, her book evokes reading aloud... reading your own life through the novels that form part of it.

Wonderful… a joyful genealogy of the female urban walker. The book’s narrative meanders brilliantly and appropriately across several times periods at once… Elkin’s Flaneuse does not simply wander aimlessly, any more than Elkin does herself in this elegant book: she uses her reflection to question, challenge and create anew the life that she observes.

An intense meditation on what it means to be a women and walk out in the world. Flaneuse encourages its readers to lace up their shoes and go for a walk. Elkin lets the reader become a companion to many women who have thought seriously about the relationship between a woman and the path she chooses to tread.

I've been waiting for years to see the history of women walkers in the city added to the critical literature of the flaneur--and here, in Lauren Elkin's really smart and lovely book

Engaging, inspiring and vigorous... The persuasiveness with which she urges us to rethink and expand our understanding of the art of flânerie, together with the force of her insights and the strength and weight of her voice, leaves us with a contribution to the field that feels singular. Buy it, read it, talk about it. And carry it with you in your mind when you next go walking in the city.

Flâneuse offers a rich engagement with the “psychogeography” of 20th-century literature and the contemporary city… A rich, rewarding pedalogue

In her richly evocative and absorbing debut, cultural critic Elkin homes in on the female version of the flaneur . . . In this insightful mix of cultural history and memoir, Elkin emerges at the protagonist as she mines her personal journey from the suburbs of Long Island to her current home in Paris

An appealing blend of memoir, scholarship, and cultural criticism . . . Elkin's own story runs through the text like a luminous thread. She tells us the woman-in-the-street stories of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, Agnès Varda, and Martha Gellhorn, but all sorts of other cultural figures appear, including Barthes, Rilke, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Derrida, Dickens, and numerous others . . . Enlightening walks through cities, cultural history, and a writer's heart and soul

This is a book about wandering women, the author included, who build relationships with their cities by walking through them . . . Women can and do make feminist statements simply by strolling through their stomping grounds; Elkin creates an interesting and inarguable case for this. She, too, is a wanderer and provides compelling anecdotes about her own journeys, interspersed with those of literary heavy-hitters George Sand, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and others . . . This is ultimately a celebration of women. You'll want to take a stroll by the end

Told in a light and humorous way, Elkin’s cultural meander provides plenty of food for thought.

A fascinating way to write about George Sand, Virginia Woolf and others, plus Elkin’s own artistic explorations of Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo. It makes us all want to be London wanderers.

Elkin delivers a prococative yet light and humorous read, mingling her own memories with those of the female artists she portrays.

With this book, Elkin hopes to track down the female equivalent – the flâneuse – to ‘see where a woman might fit into the cityscape’… It is a timely effort: in the Trump era of manspreading and male privilege, it is especially vital that we pay attention to notions of gendered space. Elkin’s prose is wry, insightful and saturated with detail

Elkin is a beguiling writer, and resolutely female, her sentences doing what Virginia Woolf wanted women's sentences to do, which is to "hold back the male flood"… Flâneuse is a riposte to all that macho stomping about… Flâneuse is so rich with shining trinkets and wise thoughts that not a single page disappoints or bores. It's that rare thing these days - a work of feminism which is enthused by literature and art and ideas rather than pop culture.

Elkin explores the history of people and places in astonishing detail. She writes with a passion and personality that creates the kind of familiarity which encourages us to believe that the women she studies were close friends of hers… Elkin's first person, colloquial yet witty style lets you into the recesses of her imagination and invites you to be her travel companion

Lauren Elkin is one of our most valuable critical thinkers – the Susan Sontag of her generation

*Shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay* 
 
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 by the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, Observer, The Millions and Emerald Street 
 
'Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. 
 
That is an imaginary definition.' 
 
If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia – then what exactly is a flâneuse? 
 
In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities. 
 
From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, Flâneuse considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.

Vocal Break

Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London.

A dazzlingly original reassessment of the power and plurality of women's singing voices by the critically acclaimed author of Art Monsters and Scaffolding 
 
For millennia, women’s raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. 
 
In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices – and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism. 
 
Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing. A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers, so from one thing to another, and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there. Immersing readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to art punk, what follows is a full-throated tour of women’s voices, including Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyoncé, FKA Twigs and Billie Eilish. 
 
Reflecting on what makes women’s singing so powerful – to the point where others feel the need to control or manipulate it – Vocal Break is a joyous call to arms, a siren call: 
 
Girls to the front: NOW.

Lauren Elkin

Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…but it is elevated by the writer’s elegant, original and often very funny prose

Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed

[Scaffolding is] atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised

Scaffolding is an ambitious, multi-generational book that reckons with legacy and feminist resistance…truly fascinating… a provocative study

'Lauren Elkin is a writer than can jump between genres so seamlessly, she deserves to be a household name...Elkin continues to dazzle with her keen observations and reflective prose'

'An unabashedly philosophical novel — one that keeps the reader hooked by the sensuality of its prose'

Elkin’s first novel is a brainy sex comedy… Scaffolding joins books by Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy, and as an erudite lust quadrilateral interested in ethical quandaries… There’s no shortage of excitement in the twists supplied by what each character doesn’t know (or chooses to hide or ignore) about one another

A compelling work of fiction… the book will linger long in the reader’s heart and mind

[Scaffolding] unspools layers of psychic history to ask questions about the nature of desire and the possibility, or not, of intimacy… Anna’s first-person vice…is immersive. The conversations she reports feel authentic, with mundanities jostling up against profundities

Scaffolding shows off Elkin’s rich, scholarly mind to great effect… a book laden with lust and desire… I expect to see Elkin’s debut feature on many end-of-year lists, and deservedly so

Scaffolding is absolutely a novel of ideas…The prose is as well crafted as Elkin’s nonfiction leads us to expect, and the characters are very finely developed… Not every good essayist should write a novel, but we should be glad Lauren Elkin did

'Scaffolding is ingenious and febrile, delving into the intimacy and implacability of those awakening connections that layer, echoing, throughout our lives - doing so in ways that feel all at once vital, playful, profoundly moving. It’s a beautifully fluid meditation on what is at stake, and who we become, when we desire.'

'A subtle, sexy, exquisitely written jewel of a book'

'Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly ... a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise.'

'My week – my life! – has been hugely improved by this compulsive, twisting story of psychoanalysis, politics and the weirdness of inhabitation itself. Elkin writes about the wrong-headedness and right-headedness of desire with high intelligence spliced with voluble wit, and a dark clarity spliced with generosity.'

'Be warned: this novel will absorb you, disassemble you, and leave you strangely unwilling to put yourself back together again. Read it, reread it, then give it to your friends and teachers, your relatives and your lovers.'

'Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a novel that's remarkable for its combination of intellectual toughness and sensual precision. This investigation into multiple forms of exposure – inhabited by an array of chords and repeats and hauntings – feels urgently contemporary.’

'I time travelled with Lauren Elkin and found myself in a Parisian apartment soaking in human stories and palpitating with new discoveries as I turned each page. What a rich, tantalising narrative defying conventions, which could only ever have been written by an author who has experienced a multiplicity of lives and the true meaning of home.'

This perplexing and intriguing novel is worth it… this is a novel that will make you think – about relationships, about what our memories and our identities mean when we try to end them or begin them

Scaffolding is a multi-layered, intelligent novel

‘Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…elegant, original and often very funny’ Kevin Barry, New Statesman Books of the Year 
 
Two couples inhabit the same apartment in Paris, almost fifty years apart… 
 
2019. When David takes a job in London, Anna is left alone in their Paris apartment. It’s August and the city is deserted but when Clémentine moves into the building, Anna finds herself drawn inextricably into the younger woman’s world… 
 
1972. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and contemplating pregnancy. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood and both have distractions outside their marriage… 
 
As the two couples face the challenges of marriage and fidelity, the characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. 
 
‘Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed’ Stylist 
 
‘Atmospheric and evocative’ Observer

Lauren Elkin

Praise for Scaffolding

Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…but it is elevated by the writer’s elegant, original and often very funny prose

Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed

[Scaffolding is] atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised

Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…but it is elevated by the writer’s elegant, original and often very funny prose

Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed

[Scaffolding is] atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised

Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…but it is elevated by the writer’s elegant, original and often very funny prose

Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed

[Scaffolding is] atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised

Books by Lauren Elkin

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