Dear readers, today marks the much-anticipated release of Poetics of Work! There is cause for celebration, with the equally much-anticipated reopening of bookshops across the country next week. Why the bananas? You may ask. Needless to say, the answer is in the book.
Published in March in the USA by our brilliant American partner Transit Books, Noémi Lefebvre’s second novel to be published in English (further to the critically acclaimed début Blue Self-Portrait) Poetics of Work was listed in LitHub’s most anticipated books of 2021 and The New York Times’ Globetrotting round-up of new books in translation.
‘Noémi Lefebvre refines a form of vital poetic resistance that ultimately unleashes a strange and subversive political animal, half orang and half utan. At once lyrical and feverish, Poetics of Work will do you a power of good.’
—Le Monde des livres
At a mere 105 pages, this new Spring offering packs a serious punch – hopefully it will inspire, rather than knock you out. So if you’re still with us…
Follow Lefebvre’s gender-neutral narrator as they take to the streets of Lyon, navigating the 2015 national state of emergency, and reflecting on police brutality, the language of fascism and the trap of employment. Originally published in France in 2018, Poetics of Work has proved disturbingly relevant to the present in the UK (with the advent of the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and its restrictions on protests and protestors).
In Lefebvre’s words: ‘The interesting thing… was creating a character who’s in a double bind in this capitalistic environment, and who’s going to try to find some kind of freedom, some kind of understanding – an existence which is more free and more intelligent than what seems to be offered to them, or imposed on them.’
If you’re not yet sufficiently tantalised, there are exclusive extracts of the book on LitHub and the more recent ‘The Mob and the Crowd’ on Granta. There’s also an exclusive interview with Noémi Lefebvre for DOCUMENT Journal, and a new original piece written for the launch of the book, and published today by Hotel in which Noémi finds a searching interviewer in... herself.
Sophie Lewis's essay 'Translating Emergencies' can be read on PEN Transmissions. See here for a fascinating live conversation between Sophie Lewis and Amsterdam-based Kate Briggs, hosted by Brooklyn Community Bookstore for the US book launch.'
We are thrilled at the warm press response so far, from the hotly mediatic New Yorker to the hotly medicated Triumph of the Now. Scott Manley Hadley was the very first UK writer to review the book, all the way from his new abode in Canada: ‘rare writing depicting middle class rootlessness not as tragedy’.
‘This experimental novel is partly a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for poets and partly a Socratic dialogue with a superego called Papa, who thinks poetry is pointless. An unnamed, genderless narrator wanders around Lyon, smoking joints and questioning society’s ideas of usefulness. (...)They read obsessively about the Third Reich and see echoes in the xenophobic tenor of contemporary France, hinting that capitalism and fascism share a disregard for anything considered unproductive.’ — The New Yorker.
‘Lefebvre’s shiftless narrator searches for the place of poetry in a world gone mad, where the “culture sector is a graveyard for the soul’s repose.” … an interior monologue filled with sharp observations, hysterical asides, and a sincere search for personal truth. Lefebvre succeeds in mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis.’
— Publishers Weekly
Read a short biography of Noémi Lefebvre here.
Read a short biography of her translator Sophie Lewis here.
BUY a copy chez nous, or support your local independent bookshop and buy or order a copy from them.