We are very excited to be welcoming our friends Tripwire Journal [who are joining us all the way from California!] and Pamenar Press to celebrate the work of a very important writer indeed: Leslie Kaplan. We are very lucky to be hosting the launch of TWO Kaplan books available in English for the first time.

The French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L’exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018 Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the first English language edition of the book.

Now, from Pamenar Press we have the first English edition of The Book of Skies, also translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Like its predecessor Excess—The Factory this collection emerged from Kaplan’s experience of participating in the national strike and social revolution of 1968 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory famously put the factory experience on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after ‘68 as the speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

Alongside this, we are delighted that our comrade David Buuk from Tripwire will be joining us to launch a new English edition of Kaplan’s novella, Miss Nobody Knowsp; about the lived aftermath of May ’68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.A book described by Jean-Luc Godard as ‘so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.”

“Ostensibly about the May ’68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr

This is a free event but please RSVP using the link below. BYOB.