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The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn HejinianLyn Hejinian's
Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an 'I' and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian's lifelong exploration of thought's infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from
A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to
My Life and
A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks
Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian's life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence.
About the author
LYN HEJINIAN (1941-2024) was a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She was the author of numerous books including
Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, and the bestselling,
My Life and My Life in the Nineties. She was a co-founder and co-editor of a number of publishing ventures and literary journals including Nion Editions, FLOOR, Atelos, Tuumba Press and
Poetics Journal. She was the John F. Hotchkiss Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.
