Common Life

Author: Stéphane Bouquet Translator: Lindsay Turner Publisher: Nightboat Books (2023) In three poems, one play, and three short stories, 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? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future. "Turner’s excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride." –Publishers Weekly "Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet—at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious—and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and na