Camille Bordas

Sep 10, 2024 | chicagomag.com | Camille Bordas

When the Democrats Came to Chicago French novelist Camille Bordas chronicles a raucous convention unlike any other — and the grand spectacle of democracy in America. By the time you read this, the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be old news. You’ll know it wasn’t a repeat of 1968. You’ll know Beyoncé didn’t show up.

Sep 2, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Camille Bordas |Edmund Gordon

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing programmes an unusual twist. Can you really teach someone how to be funny?

Jul 1, 2024 | literaryreview.co.uk | Camille Bordas

To see the most mundane of their experiences, relationships and idle thoughts as material is what writers do. Writers, indeed artists of all stripes, do not merely live their day-to-day existence but treat it as the raw stuff of life, to be shaped into art. Or, as with the trainee stand-up comics depicted in Camille Bordas’s brilliant novel, mined for laughs. One thing this novel suggests is that transforming life into material is something we all do, all the time.

Jun 23, 2024 | entertainment-mag.com | Camille Bordas

In our present-day screenopolis of constant entertainment and commerce, the performers in “The Material” agonize over the integrity of comedy as live art form. What, they are all wondering in various ways, is OK to use, and by whom? Addiction? The Holocaust? Child molestation? Gender and race? Also, is it possible Andy Kaufman faked his own death for the most committed bit in history, and if so, was that ethical?

Jun 23, 2024 | nytimes.com | Camille Bordas

THE MATERIAL, by Camille BordasEveryone's a critic - and now, it seems, a comedian too. Actual one-liners are what flourish on the platform now known with titanium self-seriousness as X. "Content creators," a terrible umbrella term that covers some very funny and talented people, are arguably your new late-night hosts, yukking it up over there on TikTok.