At the close of the decade, in October 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall sounded the knell of the Cold War, bringing on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of its satellite states.
Kept invisible behind the Iron Curtain and forced into silence for well over fifty years, these Eastern countries started to open up: in no time, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin became the emerging “happening capitals.”1
The American novelist Arthur Phillips recounts this startling awakening in his novel Prague,2 a reference to the emblematic port of call for these adventurers. As always, economic factors played an essential role in the shift: Paris had become too expensive for “these young bohemians and wannabe novelists”3 while they could live well and cheaply in these new destinations. Likewise, Edmund White, the leading figure of the Third Wave, anticipates this culmination of an era in his literary memoir: “Mine was probably the last generation that took France seriously. We knew that we were ending a long glorious tradition of Americans in France.”4
The exodus of American expatriates to more distant European horizons could have meant the closing of our bookstore, but by an extraordinary stroke of fortune, the 1980s brought about a literary renewal in the US. “A gale is blowing,” Raymond Carver told us at the Village Voice in 1987. “American literature is going through a very healthy and productive period.”
Characterized by its vitality and diversity, this effusion of writing would likewise become immensely popular in France and create a new interest in postwar American literature. In the late 1980s, and especially the 1990s, the display tables in Paris bookstores teemed with fiction rendered into French by a new generation of talented translators and published by dynamic, young publishers. These are the voices from the US explored in the following pages.
First Among Equals. In the November 5, 1999, issue of the British trade journal The Bookseller. Designed by Katia Gerasimov.