And Suddenly into Nothing
Suzanne Doppelt
Translated by Cole Swensen
2026
///////// 84 Pages
///////// 12.7 x 20.3 cm
ISBN: 9781915341297
In the middle of a London park, a couple behaves strangely under the gaze of a photographer who happens to be there and captures them through his viewfinder. When he realizes that he may have witnessed a crime while thinking he was photographing a simple encounter, the park becomes a theater. The scene, usually mundane, opens and closes at the same time, becoming a genre scene that he will attempt to elucidate in the chemical bath of his laboratory and through an on-site investigation. The photographer has seen what he will never see again, or thought he saw, or perhaps did not see. A murder has undoubtedly taken place, and the park is an incredible trap for his gaze, but nothing will come of it, and the mystery remains unsolved.
This book revolves primarily around Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up, but also Julio Cortazar's short story Les fils de la vierge, which inspired it, and Witold Gombrowicz's novel La pornographie.
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Suzanne Doppelt studied philosophy and taught for several years. Since 1995, she has been writing and occasionally taking photographs. Most of her books, published by P.O.L, from Totem to Un beau masque prend l’air, deal with perception. What do we see? Spiritualist images, Le pré est vénéneux, anamorphoses, Lazy Suzie, Jacopo di Barbari's painting, La plus grande aberration, the theater saturated with signs in Amusements de mécanique, Vak Spectra's optical box, and the soap bubble in Rien à cette magie attempt to answer this banal question. Meta donna is interested in the tarantula of Puglia in the 1960s, Et tout soudain en rien in Antonioni's film Blow Up, and Un beau masque prend l'air revolves around 17 paintings featuring an animal.
Her books have been translated in the United States, Norway, Uruguay, Brazil, and Italy.
She has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the French Institute in Naples, the Martine Aboucaya Gallery, the Louvre Museum, NYU, and the cipM, among others.
She created the magazine Détail with Pierre Alferi and was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Vacarme.
She edited the collection “Le rayon des curiosités” for Bayard.
Winner of the Villa Médicis hors les murs (Naples)
Residency at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Residency at the Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
Residency Le Nôtre, Versailles, with Cole Swensen
2020: Residency at the Michalski Foundation, Switzerland
Cole Swensen has twenty books of poetry out, most recently Veer (Alice James Books, 2026). A former Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize, among others, she has also been a finalist for the Griffin Prize, the National Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award and was awarded the 2025 Paul Engle Prize by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Also a translator, she is the translation editor for the journal Fence and has won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Translation, the 2024 ALTA National Translation Prize, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize.