Kenning Editions is proud to announce the publication of Nathalie Quintane‘s Tomatoes + Why doesn’t the far left read literature? translated from the French by Marty Hiatt, and with a foreword by Juliana Spahr.
Tomatoes can be read as an inventory of what society as it is, in the extreme contemporary, makes of us…a short book we meditate on for a long time.–L’Humanité (2010)
Nathalie Quintane…experiments with the possibility of a new insurgent writing. For this, the author performs a double gesture. It begins by recognizing the caesura that separates the words of yesterday from those of today…Once this caesura is marked, she affirms that it is not a question of rehashing the formulas of the past. If it is necessary to find these, it is to be better able to draw up an inventory, without arrogance, in all lucidity…This text reads like a prose poem.–Le Monde (2011)
…one question here is “why don’t you read literature, or what is generally understood by the term ‘literature’, any more, or why do you read less?” Quintane writes this after stating that she is the “far left.” And presents this as a question for the far left. In some ways this is not a question unique to the far left. It is a question that could be asked even by those who identify as liberal and who thus own almost all the literature, at least in the thing that is the United States…Quintane has done us a favor and pointed a way forward for us. She has written something that appears to be about being French but is also about being American and yet is not global. We are not all in the same literature. We just have to negotiate similar structural conditions.–Juliana Spahr (2022)
Quintane and Hiatt will be reading alongside Rob Halpern, Adalber Salas Hernández, and Robin Myers on February 5th via livestream–free, no registrations, robotic “reminders,” or “tickets.” Simply tune in here. More details on the event here.