Speak / Stop
Speak / Stop
Noémi Lefebvre
Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis.
An irreverent semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.
—We have read Proust but we’re not sure
—Who has really read Proust
—Besides a few Proustians
—We are no Proustians
—Despite not being anti-Proustian...
Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write—a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.
Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is “a madhouse of earthworm sentences” interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre’s work.
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Praise for Speak / Stop
"Lefebvre stages a sparkling dialogue about class, literature, and longing to escape one’s life... Readers of experimental literature are in for a treat."—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Noémi Lefebvre
“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
“Brilliant, witty, utterly contemporary.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Poetics of Work is a divine, social comedy. Lefebvre finds humor in the essential paradox of the contemporary bourgeoisie, and the laughs come deep bellied and serious.”—Rain Taxi
“A smart, timely, and novel proposal for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy.”—Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up
"Blue Self-Portrait wraps its difficulties in mercurial humor and wordplay, gamely translated from the French by Sophie Lewis. It’s inviting enough to read and re-read, and dense enough to provoke different responses each time."—Sam Sacks,The Wall Street Journal
"Blue Self-Portrait is inventive and funny—as well as clever—cycling at breakneck speed through the atrocities of the 20th century."—The Millions
"Blue Self-Portrait may be the antidote to our condition of having too many things on the mind."—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, KQED
"Blue Self-Portrait glances askance at the mythos of male genius and the mute, compliant notion of womanhood on which it relies."—Public Books
"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."—Publishers Weekly
“These subjects, ranging from anxiety that his sexual desirability is dependent on his girlfriend imagining she’s sleeping with the next Schoenberg, to the paralysing effect of nazism on art, to beautiful insights into the compositional process, ensure that the book is no melancholic meditation on lost loves. For a comparatively short novel, Blue Self-Portrait yokes together an extraordinary profusion of ideas."—Eimear McBride, The Guardian
“Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even scatenato: unchained, wildly.”—BOMB Magazine
Product Info
First Published: October 1, 2024
Fiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 128 Pages
Rights: NA
978-1-945492-99-0
