About this Event
Event guidelines:
- Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card. Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
- A book signing will follow the talk.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/_YuH9zsWKdI
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
From the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, a fierce, insistent, ecstatic investigation of the female voice, its power and vulnerabilities, and the ways women sing and speak their way through the world.
For millennia, women’s raised voices have been called unruly, uncivilized, dangerous. Singing women were cast as sirens: mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death.
A vocal break is where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers—from one thing to another. What can be made in this space of transition? Lauren Elkin draws on her own experiences as a young soprano in the 1990s as well as showcasing a full-throated, full range of other singers, including Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyoncé, FKA twigs, and Billie Eilish. Looking closely at the way power and identity shape our voices, she immerses readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to folk, punk, and opera.
As she seamlessly blends cultural history, criticism, memoir, and feminist manifesto, Elkin lays out how women have used their voices to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism, sexism, and the forces that attempt to keep them quiet. What makes women’s singing so powerful—to the point at which others feel the need to control or manipulate it? Vocal Break is Elkin’s insistent, joyous call: Girls to the front, NOW!
Lauren Elkin is the author of Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lives between London and Paris.
Rachel Syme is a New York-based writer, reporter and cultural critic. She is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker, where she has been a contributor since 2012. Her cultural criticism and reported features focus primarily on the intersections of women's lives, artistic production, history, and fame, and have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, GQ, Elle, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair.
Event venue & nearby stays
Books Are Magic Montague, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, United States
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