#KateBriggs24 Part 3, Weeks 5-6
The Long Form, p. 200-259 and How to Live Together, p. 67-89
Hello! Our next video call will take place on Sunday, October 20th, at 12pm PDT, 3pm EDT, and 8pm BST. All are welcome! We have no expectations about how much people have read. If this is your first meeting or you’ve been with us all along, you are welcome either way. If a conversation about Kate Briggs and Roland Barthes sounds fun to you, please join! I will send out our meeting link a day or two before we meet.
Image from Adam James Smith.
It looks like we will get a new book translated by Kate Briggs next year! I haven’t gotten a copy of the Spring 2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions catalog yet, but Stu Hennigan posted a picture of it on twitter, and it shows that Fitzcarraldo will publish the novel Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette in Briggs’s translation. (The rest of their spring 2025 list looks fabulous too).
You can read an essay Briggs wrote on Hélène Bessette over at The Yale Review, “The Novel as Arc Lamp: The Innovative Fiction of a Forgotten French Writer.” This essay was published in December 2021. Some of us have been waiting for this book for a long time!
The Yale Review also has an extract of Briggs’s translation-in-progress from back in 2021. It has words and phrases underlined that Briggs was still working on at the time, and it will be interesting to compare the final result with this work in progress.
Sources (by which I mean someone with a locked Twitter account) tell me Lili is Crying will come out in the U.S. from New Directions in the summer.
Finally, Kim and I are cooking up plans to read Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones beginning in December and extending into the first part of 2025. Stay tuned for more!
Schedule
Week 5
Week 6
Thank you for reading and talking with us!
Rebecca and Kim
I like the Tom Jones plan. So many of the texts Barthes and Briggs refer to are now on my TBR list (Dewey, Gide, finally finish The Magic Mountain...)!