Lucie Elven

It’s​ easy to imagine Brigid Brophy at London Zoo, making notes on the animals. I can see her by Berthold Lubetkin’s disused elliptical Penguin Pool or watching the apes. Two of them

used the full extent of the cage as a cubic area: their chases went also up and down, and up and down diagonally. Sometimes they shewed boredom, the consequence of play, and would fret for a moment;...

At​ the start of María Gainza’s first novel, Optic Nerve, the narrator, an art critic who is also called María, shows a couple round a grand house in Buenos Aires. She is wearing a soaking wet dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. She tells us with some self-deprecation that her job is taking rich foreigners to see private art collections. On this occasion, she had been...

The child​ is made of unspun wool, ripped linen in a tubular hollow, rope unlacing from its braid, knotted gauze and sleeves of protective net pulled apart into rows of diamonds, as tall as the hall. Some strands pool on the floor, others drift overhead. At the other end of the room, the mother is more elaborate: her strings twist around ladders; plant fibres form wheels and trapezes....

When he arrived​ at the meditation retreat, a little south of Paris, Emmanuel Carrère was warned that he would be working with powerful psychic energies. ‘If for some reason you decide to leave mid-session,’ he and the fifty other men present were told, ‘you’ll throw the others off, and above all you’ll put yourself in danger.’ A noble silence...

Anne Serre​ was ten when her mother died in 1971. She claims to have no memory of the preceding years. ‘My father sank into a depression,’ she told the White Review in 2020, ‘and my sisters and I … tried with all our might – like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him.’ He took a job as the deputy...