Description
Book SynopsisA wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play—all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world.
In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.
Trade Review"Common Life, Lindsay Turner’s English rendition of Stéphane Bouquet’s La Vie commune (published in France in 2016), achieves something rare: an alignment between text and translation so seamless it seems to create a whole new object, neither original nor variant but a lustrous synthesis of sensibilities.”—Anahid Nersessian, NYRB
"Turner’s excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride."—Publishers Weekly
"Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet—at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious—and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and narratives, he weaves an ever expanding schema of every day queer life. A life filled with eros and wonder and political awareness. Common Life is multivalent tour de force."—Peter Gizzi
"Down-to-earth but with an eye on eternity, Common Life is full of delights—philosophical, sensual, and above all, convivial. Lindsay Turner’s English lights up Bouquet’s style with the suppleness of sunlight in Poussin—present, alert, yet poised to evanesce. This book asks what it means to live together, even in Arcadia, but its cache of lyric forms serves to test what might be perishable—art, the tongue that speaks, but never, it seems, love itself."—Joyelle McSweeney
