Naomi is joined by Lauren Elkin for a conversation on the permission-giving qualities of Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, how reading Perec made her into a writer, and what it's like to re-see the world in the way he encourages us to do. Weaving through Elkin's own experiments in seeing with her book No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and the ways we live in and through our homes with her novel Scaffolding, we land in her current home in London where her accumulated stacks of books are grouped by subject, and we get a taste of how a new stack is building toward a particular new project.

Reading List

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Georges Perec

The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen

The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop

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.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.