Disorder : A Fable

In this brilliant and hilarious political novella, Leslie Kaplan imagines a series of unconnected crimes occurring throughout France. In each, a subordinate kills someone in a superior position over them—typically with an object used in their work, be it wiring in an auto shop, a huge sack of coffee, or a blackboard eraser. While these acts (no explanation is ever given by the criminals) clearly have a class-related character, the media and public figures are loathe to admit that class struggle still exists. Their denial of reality creates another thread in this joyful, dark satire: the fumbling of “experts” who mobilize theory after theory in order to analyze what is happening without admitting that the events could have any political content.

Leslie Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, New York, but raised and educated in France. Winner of the Prix Wepler 2012 for her novel Millefeuille, she is the author of twenty titles with P.O.L and five with Gallimard: plays, novels, and books of poetry. Translations of her work exist in Spanish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish and English.

Jennifer Pap, associate professor of French at the University of Denver, centers her research around 20th and 21st century French poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, René Char, Francis Ponge, Dominique Fourcade, and Leslie Kaplan. Many of her projects examine the relation of poetry with the visual arts and the struggle of both art forms to represent historical violence since World War I. She previously co-translated Leslie Kaplan's Excess—The Factory (Commune Editions 2018)