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On Women, Music and Power

Vocal Break

‘Reading Vocal Break felt like being round at a friend's house playing through a stack of records and talking about them until sunrise. Warm, clever, funny and deeply thoughtful, this is a rich work of feminist criticism with a beautifully light touch…I loved it.’

‘An essential, eclectic, authentic exploration of the politics of women's voices. I loved it! It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker’

'Compelling, scholarly, rousing… Elkin writes with the intimate knowledge and the passion of one who sings, and the scholar’s measured and listening ear. A pitch-perfect book'

‘A thrilling, erudite exploration of the power of women’s voices, as artful as it is informed. The best kind of cultural criticism’

‘A lively and entertaining hymn to the female voice – its use, its artistry, its flaws, its triumphs, its sorrow and its rage. Elkin leaps from subject to subject with the smooth grace of a great vocalist moving between notes on a scale.’

‘A whirlwind if a book and a testament to sonic sisterhood. A compelling eclectic exploration of music from one of the finest voices of our times.’

Smart and brimful of enthusiasm, Elkin is fully tuned in to the mysteries of women’s melodies

Exploring the interplay of music, power and gender… Vocal Break is a book about what music is for. Elkin sees it as a way of getting at something that is just out of reach, a way of finding out who we are

Elkin is a skilled, versatile and intensely curious writer… [Vocal Break] is clever and original

At the core of this book is not just sharp analysis but a deep appreciation for singing and how it represents expression and freedom

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 
 
'It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker’ Viv Albertine 
 
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 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.

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 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

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

Lauren Elkin

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

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.

Lauren Elkin

Books by Lauren Elkin

Articles featuring Lauren Elkin

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