Release date June, 1, 2025
80 pages. $15.
Miss Nobody Knows, $15
Release date June, 1, 2025
US (+ $3 shipping)
International (via Asterism)
Announcing Tripwire Editions! and the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan’s crystalline novella Miss Nobody Knows, about the lived aftermath of May ’68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.
“Ostensibly about the May ’68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr
“Thank you for sending Leslie Kaplan’s book, so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.” —Jean-Luc Godard, letter to Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens
“One thought he understood it all, the other wanted to see it all. Through two opposing characters, Leslie Kaplan brings to life something of May ’68 … This novel breaks an opening out of the infinitely mad universe that was captured by Leslie Kaplan’s first book, Excess-The Factory.” —Claire Devarrieux, Libération
photo by Alecio de Andrade
Leslie Kaplan is a French poet, playwright, and novelist. From the beginning of her career, Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in many genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L’exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Other books in English translation include The Book of Skies (Pamenar Press, 2024, trans Carr & Pap) and Disorder: a fable (AK Press, 2020, trans Pap)
Jennifer Pap is an associate professor of French at the University of Denver. She has published articles on the relation of poetry and the visual arts in the work of French poets such as Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Ponge, and an article on Georges Braque and his spectators in the context of Vichy France.
Tripwire 