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Dorothy

The Endless Week

The Endless Week

by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi

$19.00
$19.00
Available as E-Book French Literature
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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: Dorothy
ISBN: 9781948980272
Pages: 296
Publication Date:

Praise

Reading this book feels like falling into a whirlpool: it’s inescapable.
—Maggie Lange, W Magazine, “Must-Read Books for Fall 2025”

Vazquez has created a unique and enduring novel. Something hard and real and tangible glitters amid the vapour of text and image she describes.
—Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review

Are the kids ok? Are the elders? Are the gods? Are the dead? In this mesmeric novel, loneliness and the (online) community, language and image, the immediate and the mediated, violence and care construct a tender, precarious microzone called intimacy. A lumbar puncture of a book, a golden strain.
—Joyelle McSweeney

It’s a rigorously unsettling reading experience, without plot, tension, or character development. But the details and countless vignettes deliver an immense range of emotion. . . . Grotesquely inventive and amusing, like a corner torn from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
—Kirkus

They say a truly great author can write about anything and make it interesting, and with The Endless Week Laura Vazquez proves that true on every page. If you’re in search of an ultra-contemporary novel that shatters all the rules with inimitable humor and style to spare, look no further—she’s arrived.
—Blake Butler

Like all great novels, The Endless Week is about life, time, and death . . . and like all great poets, Laura Vazquez has us encounter violence and beauty through sublime rhythms and poignant variations. She captures human tragedy in the repetition of words, driving the nail of reality deeper . . . Her characters exist powerfully, but not in a conventional way, and they are brought to life through a flux of consciousness that both animates and overwhelms them. . . . These ultra-connected people of the internet live in a bubble full of naïve questions and existential idiocy. . . . Through them, Laura Vazquez marvels at everything, forcing us to see the world anew in the place where humor meets melancholy.
—Camille Laurens, Le Monde

The language of this thirty-five-year-old poet from Marseille is so melodious, rhythmic, and visceral, that it recites itself. . . . [Her novel] is about life, death, and the space we can occupy in both the real and virtual worlds, but Laura Vazquez’s words don’t deserve to be flattened by such a vague and reductive summary. Her writing is all precision and breadth. . . . [H]er characters live together in the infinite space of today, on Earth and on the web.
—Marine Landrot, Télérama

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