The Endless Week

From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.

Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.

Laura Vazquez is a leading figure in contemporary French literature, and winner of the 2023 Prix Goncourt for poetry. Her debut novel, The Endless Week, won the Prix de la Page 111 and was a finalist for the Prix Wepler, and her debut collection of poetry The Hand of the Hand, won the Prix de la Vocation. She published her first play, the lesbian tragedy Zero, in 2024. Vazquez regularly gives readings around the world in venues such as the Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She lives in Marseille, France.
 
Alex Niemi is a writer and award-winning literary translator. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Heldt Prize, and the AATSEEL Prize for best poetry translation from a Slavic language. Her translations include For the Shrew and Hekate by Anna Glazova, as well as The John Cage Experiences by Vincent Tholomé. She also is the author of the poetry chapbook Elephant.