Precarious Lease
by Jacqueline Feldman
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 30 Jan 2025 | Archive Date 16 Jan 2025
Talking about this book? Use #PrecariousLease #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
On 31 December 2012, Le Bloc opened its doors. Situated at a far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue began, the legendary squat was eight stories tall and four basements deep. It took in artists and activists as well as immigrants to France from various corners of Europe, Africa and the Americas, all of whom lived and worked within Le Bloc's labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Jacqueline Feldman, a reporter from the US, spent a number of years with the residents of the squat, witnessing firsthand the creativity and grief inherent to everyday life there and the gradual dismantling of Paris's counterculture. With Precarious Lease – the title itself referring to a French legal device by which squatters could receive a temporary reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians – Feldman tells Le Bloc's story. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and with the journalistic attunement of Joan Didion, Feldman draws on Paris's revolutionary and bohemian history as she raises questions of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, idealism and utopia, creativity and precarity, ecology and the possibilities left for writing and inhabiting a capital city.
Advance Praise
‘Feldman's Precarious Lease is marked by erudition, astringence, biting wit, and the perspicacious awe of a seasoned examiner of our time, attributes bound to be hallmarks of her work for years to come. Diving under the rubble of social and class collapse, Feldman deftly maneuvers between investigative reportage and essayist forays while weaving through this tapestry a tone so sharp yet compassionate, so personal, it feels like a friend delivering dire news from the front lines of the world.’
— Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
‘In Precarious Lease Jacqueline Feldman follows her curiosity about alternate forms of living into the heart of north-east Paris’s squat scene, and takes the reader with her, asking fundamental questions about how we live together under late capitalism, and the relationship, in France, between freedom and bureaucracy, marginality and the state. It’s completely fascinating, an American in Paris memoir like no other.’
— Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters
‘Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease offers an enthralling immersion into the confluence of 2010s-era social and political activism, Parisian and French real estate and the margins of the global artworld. Multimodal in its storytelling, encompassing critical journalism, social history, the precision of documentary writing, and more, Precarious Lease also holds up a mirror to our current capitalist moment and suggests other ways of imagining our world.’
— John Keene, author of Counternarratives
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781804271407 |
| PRICE | £14.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 312 |
