Precarious Lease

In her extraordinary non-fiction debut, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a legendary squat situated at the far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue begins. Opened in 2012, the squat took in artists and activists as well as immigrants from around the world. They lived and worked within its labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Over many years Feldman, a reporter from the US, follows a cast of itinerant, displaced characters, tracing the fate of a counterculture under austerity while investigating the trending use of a legal device by which squatters could receive a reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and other chroniclers of Paris, she draws on its revolutionary and bohemian history while sounding issues of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, creativity and precarity, ecology and utopia. With gripping candour and journalistic precision, Precarious Lease is a thrilling dramatization of late-stage possibilities for co-existence in the ruins of a capital city.

‘Feldman’s Precarious Lease is marked by erudition, astringence, biting wit, and the perspicacious awe of a seasoned examiner of our time, attributes bound to be hallmarks of her work for years to come. Diving under the rubble of social and class collapse, Feldman deftly maneuvers between investigative reportage and essayist forays while weaving through this tapestry a tone so sharp yet compassionate, so personal, it feels like a friend delivering dire news from the front lines of the world.’
— Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

‘In Precarious Lease Jacqueline Feldman follows her curiosity about alternate forms of living into the heart of north-east Paris’s squat scene, and takes the reader with her, asking fundamental questions about how we live together under late capitalism, and the relationship, in France, between freedom and bureaucracy, marginality and the state. It’s completely fascinating, an American in Paris memoir like no other.’
— Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters

‘Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease offers an enthralling immersion into the confluence of 2010s-era social and political activism, Parisian and French real estate and the margins of the global artworld. Multimodal in its storytelling, encompassing critical journalism, social history, the precision of documentary writing, and more, Precarious Lease also holds up a mirror to our current capitalist moment and suggests other ways of imagining our world.’
— John Keene, author of Counternarratives

‘To trust a writer’s insight, we must first trust their eyes, must be able to see what, how, and as they see. In Precarious Lease, Jacqueline Feldman trains her vision – indeed all her senses – on the striking, insistent particulars of the culture of squatters in Paris. Feldman assuredly, brilliantly, guides us through their unstable circumstances, through their fraught world. At every turn, the urgent, vivid, vitally empathic prose of Precarious Lease is grounded in a sense of our shared, our undeniable humanity. That is where revelation springs from. You heard me right: Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease is a revelation. This is a masterful, elegant, powerful book.’ 
— Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness

‘Destined to become a classic of literary reportage, Precarious Lease: The Paris Document honors the poetry of facts in its vivid, boldly intimate depiction of artists and artists manqué struggling and dreaming in the squat houses of Paris and its peripheries. In its narrative sweep, the photorealism of its details, its sure grasp of cultural and subcultural history, its winsome and confiding tone, and its indelible portraits of eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries, Jacqueline Feldman’s deep-hearted and brilliant firsthand account offers us nothing less than utter enchantment.’
— Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted

‘Like the diary of Samuel Pepys, Precarious Lease is not so much reporting or even memoir as full-on history writing. Biased in the most important and necessary ways and at the same time telepathic, translucent, and hard-won, Feldman’s attempt at an account will make you rethink citizenship and all the hideous fictions associated with contemporary real estate. It will also remind you of the sacred and anarchic power of description.’
— Lucy Ives, author of Life is Everywhere