Like a minimalist mosaic-requiem, The Missing Pieces makes a David-Markson-esque argument for the value of the pathos-ridden holes that artists and writers leave behind. This magnificent book demonstrates why literature demands a steady stream of innovations -- and why we need to pay reverent attention to the blank and punished places where unfinished or destroyed works of art continue to make themselves heard. -- Wayne Koestenbaum
Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works
in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a
publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry.
Kate Zambreno, the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green
Girl and the work Heroines (Semiotext(e)), teaches in the writing
programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is
at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the
persistence of art, which includes Book of Mutter and the
forthcoming Drifts.
The Missing Pieces is a list not only to be read an item at a time,
but, as the very cover of the book itself might imply, to be viewed
as a mishmash of things forgotten, and of things we need to
dutifully remember.—Micah McCrary, Bookslut
Into a contemporary landscape of data mining and information
fracking comes Henri Lefebvre's The Missing Pieces, a beautifully
absurd accumulation of useless numbers and gravid blankness....
Like history's own compacted narrative, Lefebvre's economy of
restraint holds countless events suspended in a semicolon.—Prudence
Peiffer, Bookforum
I can't recommend it enough. The entries are short, tightly written
fragments—a funny, absurd, poignant and melancholy gathering of
things that once were, but are now gone.—Carolina Miranda, Los
Angeles Times
The Missing Pieces has as much to do with presence as with absence,
and this tells us something about the canon, and—forgive me—about
'poetry in general.' I mean that no equivalent list of artworks or
gains or successes could be so powerful as The Missing Pieces.—3:AM
Magazine
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