by Kate Briggs

Silent Whale Letters – A Long-Distance Correspondence, on All Frequencies
Ella Finer, Vibeke Mascini, Kate Briggs (ed.)
Sternberg Press - 16.00€ -

An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects.

As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation.

As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?

Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs).

They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons. 

Edited by Kate Briggs.
Contributions by Kate Briggs and Emma McCormick Goodhart.

The Long Form
Kate Briggs
Fitzcarraldo Editions - 22.00€ -  out of stock

The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.

Entertaining Ideas (The Long View)
Kate Briggs
Ma Bibliotheque - 12.00€ -  out of stock

Imagine that we too (imagine that I too), wanted to welcome ideas, to attend to them, to take care of them, to make sure they have a good time. Imagine that I too wanted to be a good hostess to writing ideas. How to be open to them, how to be alert to them—so that I know how and when to let them in? 

ENTERTAINING IDEAS began as a reading exercise: an effort to perform a ‘good reading’ of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View(1956), and to think about what a ‘good’ short reading of a long novel might mean, what it might look like or read like. As a translator, Kate Briggs accepts that writing out a reading involves change, tampering with what seems perfect, and doing so from necessity, as a way of learning how exactly it works. She has changed Howard’s book. Her exercise changed too, expanding unexpectedly into a set of reflections on writing backwards, living forwards, and entertaining ideas.

‘Kate Briggs generously shares with us her unique and delicately revolutionary way of reading; the moment where writing becomes the only way to grasp our slippery thoughts and desires. This book is pure joy.’
– >Alejandro Zambra

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL. She is the translator of two volumes of lecture and seminar notes by Roland Barthes (Columbia University Press, 2011 and 2013). Other publications include:Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (Information as Material, 2011), On Reading as an Alternation of Flights and Perchings (NO Press, 2013), and The Nabokov Paper (Information as Material, 2013). This Little Art, a long essay on the practice of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017.

Exercise in pathetic criticism
Kate Briggs
information as material - 11.00€ -  out of stock

Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2010) and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, due to be published in 2012. Exercise in Pathetic Criticism is the first in a projected series of experiments in literary criticism.

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