Common Life

Stéphane Bouquet, translated by Lindsay Turner

In three poems, one play, and three short stories, French writer Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today?

Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry, as well as essays on poetry. He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French.