After 8 Books, Paris

Please welcome to an evening of readings with Isabella Streffen and Sharon Kivland, introduced by Tom Allen at After 8 Books, 7 Rue Jarry, Paris on 17th February at 19h.

Isabella Streffen, Fabulae. How it begins, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2022

Isabella Streffen will read from Fabulae with Tom Allen and Tobias Ryan.  Fabulae is an experiment in close reading, responding to the question of beginning with a challenge to the philosophy of myth. With Roberto Calasso as her intimate companion, Isabella Streffen appropriates Calasso’s Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony, using his methods to counter his text by foregrounding re-reading, inserting the silent, absent voices of women, connecting the foundation of narrative to contemporary discussions of structural violence, gender, and consent.

Sharon Kivland, Abécédaire, MOIST, 2022

Sharon Kivland will read from Abécédaire, no doubt the entries on mythology (too many, said the editor), following Ariadne’s thread. Abécédaire was written during five days a week for a year, no more than a page, writing only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes, following Freud's model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting ‘as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views [...] outside’. Many of her women character’s names begin with A.

Isabella Streffen is an artist and writer, who engages with experimental criticism, the politics and poetics of perception, and the slippery territories of love through objects, encounters, and texts.
Tom Allen teaches literature and translation at the University of Paris, Nanterre and has published poetry, translations, and critical essays in Europe and the U.S.
Tobias Ryan is an English teacher, translator, and fiction editor for Minor Literature[s].
Sharon Kivland is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. She has just finished writing Almanach, the companion book to Abécédaire, which she is editing ruthlessly.