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No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute
by Lauren Elkin
Les Fugitives, £8.99
OVER a period of seven months in 2015, Franco-US writer Lauren Elkin noted particulars of her bus journeys to and from work in central Paris.
The project was intended as a means of observing the world through her phone’s Notes app, “rather than to use my phone to distract myself from the world.” Taking as her guidance a focus on the “infra-ordinary” as set out by Georges Perec, founder of the “workshop of potential literature” Oulipo, the goal was to pay attention to the everyday micro events of a mundane journey in building a record of experience.
Elkin is known for the 2016 bestseller Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, her critique of male domination of the written city. Here she becomes a Flanenbus, well prepared for the journey.

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