Lauren Elkin Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Lauren Elkin is a published American author, translator and essayist.

Born in 1978, Elkin is known for books such as Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Arts, and The New York Times considered her Flâneuse: Women Walk the City a notable book. It also was a finalist for the Art of the Essay category of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, a book of the week on Radio 4, and named a best book of 2016 by the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Observer. It has also been translated into nine languages.

Lauren has had her writing featured in publications such as Frieze, Le Monde, Granta, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Times Literary Supplement, Les Inrockuptibles, and The New York Times. She also served as the English translator for The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir. Elkin has been a translator translating from French to English for other work by authors that include Lola Lafon, Michelle Perrot, Colombe Schneck, and more.

Sewanee Review also published Lauren’s essay “This is the Beginning of Writing”, which was given notable distinction in the Best American Essays of 2019.

The author received the French-American Foundation’s translation prize in 2017 for her work on translating Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau, which was also translated and worked on by Charlotte Mandell.

The author attended the City University of New York/Université de Paris and graduated with her PhD in English. She also attended the Sorbonne and graduated with a Masters in Philosophy. She has instructed students on creative writing and literature at New York University as well as the University of Liverpool, the American University of Paris, and the Université de Paris-Denis Diderot.

She joined the Department of English at the University of Liverpool in 2016. She is a native New Yorker but then spent two decades living in Paris and currently lives in London. Her debut fictional novel is titled Scaffolding and was released in the United Kingdom in 2024.

Lauren Elkin has appeared on the television program L’Essonne en auteurs as herself in 2013.

No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus is a nonfiction memoir from Lauren Elkin. First released in 2021, this is the story of one author’s experience living in Paris and keeping track of what she saw on her bus commutes. Interesting and unique, this is not only a love letter to the city of love but a contemplation on its evolution through two decades and moving from analog to digital and moving from the 20th century to the 21st.

Lauren Elkin decided in the autumn of 2014 that it was a good time to start keeping a diary. She began noting down specific aspects of her commutes on the bus using her Notes app on the iPhone 5c. She would write down the people that she saw and various interesting things like on the Bus Lines 91 and 92, the lines that she would take when making her way from her apartment to her job teaching.

One day while reading a notice that advised people to be vigilant while using their phone out in public. She decided to use her phone to take in the world existing around her and to notice things she might have missed if she had used it the way everyone else does, utilizing apps or looking at things on the web.

In this way she would use her phone to see the world instead of an escape or a distraction from it. Then during her academic year, the Charlie Hebdo attacks went on. She also went through an ectopic pregnancy that ended up meaning that she had to go through emergency surgery.

From that point on, her daily diary became something of a study that noted the counterpoint between the normalcy of everyday and this event, mediated through technology and seen from a bus seat. This is a completely original, interesting and insightful look not only at a city but the ways that places have changed over time.

Scaffolding is the first fictional book to come out from Lauren Elkin. This is the tale of two different couples who reside in the same apartment located in the north-east area of Paris. Their lives take place nearly fifty years apart.

Anna is a psychoanalyst who is thinking about a recent miscarriage and working through it in 2019. Meanwhile her spouse David has accepted a job in London. She is spending a lot of time thinking about how she should renovate the kitchen. Meanwhile, she has made friends with a young lady who has moved into the building named Clémentine.

The girl also happens to belong to a radical feminist collective known as les colleuses. Then in 1972, a couple consisting of a woman named Florence and a man named Henry are doing their kitchen over. Florence is finishing up a degree in psychology while also doing her best to become pregnant.

Harry is not certain that he’s ready to be a father, but he’s going to take things on as best that he can. Both of these couples exist years apart but they also share a lot in common and are facing similar issues. Each contends with dealing with marriage and its challenges, fidelity, and pregnancy.

The characters have no idea that they shared the same place but the reader gets the chance to see how they go through the various points of their lives and how they deal with the challenges that are before them.

This insightful story focuses on the relationships that we make with people and how tough it is to really sever them. It’s also about the different ways that people we have known in the past continue to live within us as well as how homes that we live in can contain communal memories of not only the people who live in them but the stories that have gone on there.

Pick up a copy of Scaffolding to follow along with these characters, go on the journey, and find out what happens in this incredible fictional debut from the sensational Lauren Elkin.