1 Erica Warner, “A Quiet Murmur, a Mighty Voice” in The Times Online, June 28, 2009.
1 Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (New York: Viking, 1941).
2 Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1971). Translated into French as Manuel de l’animateur social (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976).
1 “Paris, Paris Above All, Paris!” This quote is from Steve Twomey’s “Paris’ New Literati Conjure Up Ghosts of a New Generation.” Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1985.
1 Hazel Rowley, “Beyond Bookkeeping,” The Australian Literary Review, December 2007, reprinted under the title “It Takes a Village” in Bookforum, February/March 2008.
2 Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 20.
3 Edmund White, My Lives (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 198.
4 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974).
5 La nuit princesse, Guy d’Arcangues (Brussels: André de Rache, 1981), dedicated to Jean Castel, the owner of the private club Chez Castel.
6 Barry Gifford, “The Lost and Found Generation: Odile Hellier and the Village Voice Bookstore,” Punch magazine, April 23, 1986.
7 The Village Voice was brought to us weekly by Stanley Hertzberg, an American broker in the international press.
1 The title “Paris Was a Woman” refers to Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank, title borrowed from Andrea Weiss (London: HarperCollins, 1995). The author presented her book at the Village Voice on June 20, 1996.
2 “In the rue Princesse, a few streets away from the rue de L’Odéon . . .”— Barry Gifford, “Lost and Found Generation,” San Francisco Review of Books, 1985.
3 William Wiser, Book World, October 13, 1985; Wiser is the author of The Great Good Place: American Expatriate Women in Paris (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), presented at the Village Voice on November 22, 1991.
4 Noël Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983). Riley Fitch launched two more books at the Village Voice: Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (London: Little, Brown, 1993) and Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1997).
5 Noël Riley Fitch, Village Voice reading, July 31, 1983. Eleanor herself had related this anecdote to Fitch.
6 Fitch, Village Voice reading, July 31, 1983.
7 Fitch, Village Voice reading, 1983.
8 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, University of Texas, 1986.
9 Shari Benstock, Village Voice reading, January 15, 1987.
10 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank.
11 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank.
12 Shari Benstock, Village Voice reading, January 15, 1987. Some elements in her talk are drawn from the presentation of her biography of Edith Wharton: No Gifts from Chance (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), which she launched at the Village Voice in 1995.
13 Shari Benstock, Village Voice reading, 1987.
14 Natalie Barney, Aventures de l’esprit,
15 Joan Schenkar, Village Voice reading, October 10, 2000.
16 Rémy de Gourmont, Lettres à l’Amazone (Paris: Mercure de France, 1927).
17 Joan Schenkar, Village Voice reading, 2000.
18 Barney evokes her life-changing encounter with Oscar Wilde as a small child in Aventures de l’esprit.
19 Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece (London: Virago Press, 2000).
20 Schenkar, Truly Wilde, 166. Schenkar is also the author of (among other works) a collection of plays Signs of Life, Six Comedies of Menace (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) and the biography The Talented Miss Highsmith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), all of them presented at the Village Voice.
21 Joan Schenkar, Village Voice reading, 2000.
22 Village Voice reading, quote from Truly Wilde, 169.
1 “There can be no innovation without tradition . . .”— John Strand, Paris Exiles, Winter 1984.
2 Paris Passion: The Magazine of Paris. Its life span (1981-1994) coincides with that of the Third Wave of American expatriates in Paris.
3 Bernard-Henri Lévy, known as BHL, was one leader of the new French intellectual current called “Les Nouveaux Philosophes,” much in vogue in the 1980s.
4 The history of the American Center in Paris is told with brio by Nelcya Delanoë in Le Raspail vert: l’American center à Paris (1934-1994): Une histoire des avant-gardes franco-américaines (Paris: Seghers, 1994). The author launched her work at the Village Voice (December 8, 1994), introduced by Henry Pillsbury, film director, actor, and a long-time director of the American Center.
5 Editors, Paris Exiles.
6 An American expatriate artist, Minick designed the magazines Paris Exiles and Sphinx. Together with his partner Jiao Ping, they launched their book Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century at the Village Voice on October 26, 1990. Ricardo Mosner had been living in exile in Paris since the 1970s. Two major exhibits in New York and Paris enhanced his reputation.
7 Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz), became famous in the Western world in 1966 when he was sentenced to seven years of prison for his anti-Soviet fictional characters. Thereafter, forced to exile, he settled in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris where he died in 1997.
8 Nancy Huston, Lettre Internationale, N°٢١, ١٩٨٩.
9 David Applefield, interview in Paris Voice, 2004.
10 Alain Bosquet, of Russian origin, is the author of a large body of work, including poems, essays, novels, and plays.
11 Edouard Roditi, Village Voice reading, July 4, 1985.
12 Among the American writers invited to this International Writers’ Conference (1962) were William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Mary McCarthy.
13 Lynne Tillman is an American novelist and the author of Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999).
14 Jim Haynes, Thanks for Coming (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Meeting Jim (2018) is a documentary film of Haynes’ life and his celebrated dinners “Chez Jim.”
1 The title “Black America in Paris: Updating the Myth” references the cover headline of Paris Passion, Issue 44, January 1986.
2 Baldwin divided his time between the US and his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in Provence.
3 Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
4 James Baldwin, “The New Lost Generation” (1961), in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998).
5 Baldwin, “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950), in Collected Essays.
6 Gordon Heath had not always been a singer of American spirituals and folksongs, but, as Baldwin recalled, he had enjoyed an international career as one of the rare African American actors performing Shakespearian roles on New York and London stages. Together with his American actor friend Lee Payant, he opened the night club The Abbaye in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, famous for its “caves” and cabarets, to present a repertoire of American jazz and folk music.
7 Ted Joans, The Truth: Mehr Blitzliebe Poems (Hamburg: Loose Blätter Press, 1983).
8 Leonard Weinglass, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Fight against the Death Penalty, with an introduction by E. L. Doctorow (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995).
9 His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2011.
10 Ernest Gaines, A Lesson before Dying (New York: Knopf, 1993).
11 James Emanuel, Reaching for Mumia: 16 Haikus (Paris: l’Insomniaque, 1995). He wrote the poems to raise funds for a new trial for Mumia.
12 Emanuel, Deadly James and Other Poems (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1987).
13 Richard Wright, A Father’s Law (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
14 Julia Wright, Village Voice reading, May 29, 2008.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid, also mentioned in her introduction to the novel.
17 Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), Collected Essays.
18 Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), Collected Essays.
19 Jake Lamar, Bourgeois Blues (New York: Plume, 1992). Village Voice reading, January 1, 1995.
20 Lamar, Rendezvous Eighteenth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Village Voice reading, November 20, 2003.
21 Lamar, Ghosts of Saint-Michel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006). Village Voice reading, June 6, 2006.
22 Lamar, Rendezvous Eighteenth, 177.
1 “Emergence of a Literary Force,” Title inspired by Elizabeth Venant’s article in the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1986.
2 Jeff Greenwald, San Francisco Examiner, February 1988.
3 Virginia Larner, “Making Waves: A Letter from Paris,” ALSC Newsletter, Winter 2003.
4 Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).
5 Ibid.
6 Johnson is the author of the Paris trilogy: Le divorce, Le mariage, and l’Affaire, as well as several nonfiction books and a biography of Dashiell Hammett.
7 “A Conversation with Diane Johnson,” Paris through Expatriate Eyes, Terrance Gelenter, Paris, December 2010.
8 Diane Johnson, Into a Paris Quartier (Washington, DC: National Geographic Directions, 2000).
9 Steven Barclay, A Place in the World Called Paris, with a foreword by Susan Sontag (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994).
10 Barclay, A Place in The World Called Paris, 24, 87.
11 Steven Barclay, Village Voice reading, June 29, 1995.
12 David Downie, Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light (Fort Bragg, CA: Transatlantic Press, 2005).
13 The word “bouquiniste” is derived from “bouquin,” the familiar French term for a book.
14 David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000). Translated into French by Georges Monny as Je parler français (Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 2000). Village Voice reading, December 5, 2000.
15 Sedaris, Village Voice reading February 9, 2006, from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Boston: Little, Brown, 2004).
16 In Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Édition Gibert Jeune, 1959).
17 Edmund White, The Flâneur, 16.
18 White, The Farewell Symphony (London: Vintage UK, 1998), 456.
19 White, The Flâneur, quotes in order: 52, 46, 47.
20 White, The Farewell Symphony, 456.
21 Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York: Random House, 2000).
22 Gopnik, Paris to the Moon.
23 Diane Johnson, Persian Nights (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987).
24 Johnson, Le divorce (New York: Dutton, 1998), followed by Le mariage and, the last, l’affaire. Le divorce was translated into French as Une américaine à Paris (Paris: Editions Nil, 2000).
25 C. K. Williams, introduction to Diane Johnson, Village Voice reading, October 5, 2000.
26 Johnson, Village Voice reading, October 5, 2000.
27 Alan Riding, “The Writer’s Notebook,” New York Times, April 1997.
28 Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (New York: Dutton, 1983), published in French under the title Un jeune américain (Paris: Rivages, 1984). White’s other launches at the Village Voice included Forgetting Elena; Nocturnes for the King of Naples; Caracole; The Beautiful Room Is Empty; The Farewell Symphony; The Married Man; Fanny: A Fiction; Genet: A Biography; and The Darker Proof (with Adam Mars Jones). White also introduced many American authors, both famous and relatively unknown.
29 Susan Sontag’s blurb on the back cover of A Boy’s Own Story.
30 Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (New York: Knopf, 1998), 461; Village Voice reading, September 12, 1998.
31 White, The Flâneur, 159.
32 Vogue magazine, February 1988.
33 White, Genet: A Biography, with a chronology by Albert Dichy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Translated into French by Philippe Delamarre (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). Village Voice reading, October 22, 1993.
34 White, Genet: A Biography.
35 Genet’s response to Sartre’s remark in his biography Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).
36 White, Village Voice reading, April 24, 1997.
1 All these details on Joyce’s stay in Pula come from Ivanjek’s typescript of his documentary film, Village Voice Bookshop archive.
2 John Calder, The Theology of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder Publications, an imprint of Alma Classics, 2012), and its companion essay The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 2001).
3 Calder, Village Voice reading, March 29, 2012.
4 Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).
5 Atik, Village Voice reading, December 4, 2003.
6 Festival Les Belles Etrangères: Irlande, November 27 to December 7, 1989. Reading at the Village Voice, November 27, 1989.
7 Derek Mahon, Village Voice reading, November 27, 1989.
8 Harry Clifton, The Desert Route: Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992); Night Train through the Brenner (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1994).
9 Deirdre Madden, Nothing Is Black (London: Faber & Faber, 1994).
10 Mahon, foreword to The Desert Route, by Derek Mahon.
11 Harry Clifton, Village Voice reading, June 21, 2000.
12 Clifton, On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi (London: Macmillan, 1999).
13 Clifton, Village Voice reading, June, 21, 2000.
14 Ellen Hinsey, introduction to Harry Clifton, Village Voice reading, June 21, 2000.
15 Clifton, Night Train through the Brenner.
16 Madden, Remembering Light and Stone (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
17 Madden, One by One in the Darkness (London: Faber & Faber, 1996).
18 Madden, Village Voice reading, September 26, 2002.
19 Madden, from Nothing Is Black, Village Voice reading, April 14, 1996.
20 Madden, Authenticity (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). Village Voice reading, September 26, 2002.
21 Clifton, “To the Fourteenth District” in Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2008).
1 “Varieties of Exile”: This title references Mavis Gallant’s collection Varieties of Exile, ed. Russell Banks (New York Review Books, 2003).
2 Nancy Huston, Village Voice reading, December 4, 2002.
3 Nancy Huston, Nord perdu (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). Translated into English in 2002 by the author.
4 Mavis Gallant, afterword to Paris Stories, selected with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje (New York: New York Review Books, 2002).
5 Marta Dvorak, a scholar specialized in Canadian literature, wrote an essay on Gallant, The Eye and the Ear (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).
6 Gallant, Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985).
7 Gallant, Paris Notebooks, Essays and Reviews (Toronto: Macmillan, 1986). Translated into French by Françoise Barret as Chroniques de mai 68, (Paris: Deuxtemps Tierce, 1988).
8 Gallant, Village Voice reading, May 17, 1988.
9 “Miss Barricades” in Évènement du Jeudi, 1968.
10 Gallant, Rue de Lille, trans. Pierre-Edmond Robert (Paris: Deuxtemps Tierce, 1988).
11 Gallant, Paris Stories (New York: New York Review Books, 2002).
12 Gallant, letter to me, October 22, 2004.
13 “The Other Paris,” one of her first New York stories, later reprinted in The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (New York: Random House, 1996).
14 Gallant, Village Voice reading of The Pegnitz Junction, June 11, 1999.
15 “Varieties of Exile” (1976) reprinted in Varieties of Exile, selected with an introduction by Russell Banks (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).
16 Gallant, letter to me, October 22, 2003.
17 Gallant, letter to me, August 6, 1999.
18 Gallant, letter to me, October 22, 2003.
19 Gallant, Village Voice reading, June 11, 1999. The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories (Port Townsend, WA: Graywolf Press, 1984).
20 Gallant, afterword, Paris Stories.
21 Michael Ondaatje, introduction to Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant.
22 Gallant, The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories, with introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).
23 Gallant/Lahiri joint reading at Village Voice, February 19, 2009.
24 Gallant, What Is to Be Done? (Ontario: Quadrant Editions, 1983).
25 Gallant, letter to me, March 23, 2009. Allusion to her joint reading with Michael Ondaatje, October 19, 2004.
26 Gallant, Village Voice reading, December 3, 2009.
27 Gallant, letter to me, September 2004.
1 Paul Gilet, Le Monde des Livres, February 1973.
2 Raymond Federman, Smiles on Washington Square (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985).
3 Raymond Federman, The Voice in the Closet, (Buffalo, NY: Starcherone Books, 1979).
4 Federman, Village Voice reading, March 25, 1986.
5 “Happy fous” meaning “happy foolish.”
6 Carmen Callil, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006). Translated into French by Françoise Jaouen as Darquier de Pellepoix, ou la France trahie (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2007). Village Voice reading, April 18, 2006.
7 Marc Parent, editor at Buchet-Chastel, introduced several of his authors at the bookshop, including English-language Indian writers.
8 Carmen Callil, Bad Faith, Village Voice reading, April 18, 2006.
9 Callil, Village Voice reading, April 18, 2006.
10 Callil, Bad Faith, 104.
11 British by birth, Alan Riding is a journalist and long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He is likewise the author of Essential Shakespeare Handbook (2004) and Eyewitness Companions: Opera (2006).
12 Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Knopf, 2010).
13 Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
14 Riding, Village Voice reading. And the Show Went On, 240.
15 Censorship imposed on La Bibliothèque nationale de France applied to all libraries, bookstores, and publishing houses. See Janet Skeslien Charles’s The Paris Library, a semi-fictionalized memoir of the American Library in Paris under Nazi occupation (New York: Atria, Simon & Schuster, 2020).
16 Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Village Voice reading, November 16, 2011.
17 Simone de Beauvoir quoted by Riding, Village Voice reading, February 3, 2011.
18 Herbert R. Lottman, The Purge: The Purification of the French Collaborators After World War II (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1986). The author presented it at the Village Voice on October 15, 1986.
19 This chapter is entirely based on Alan Riding’s talk at the Village Voice, February 3, 2011.
20 Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
21 Guilloux, OK, Joe (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Translated into English by Alice Kaplan as OK, Joe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
22 Introduction by Robert Grenier, Village Voice reading, October 6, 2005.
1 Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 22.
2 Arthur Phillips: Prague (New York: Random House, 2002). Village Voice reading, November 26, 2002.
3 White, The Flâneur, 22.
4 White, The Unpunished Vice (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 167.
1 Quote from Coover’s Paris is Burning (New York: Viking, 1976). Robert Coover, Village Voice reading, 1986.
2 Jim Haynes, see Part I, Chapter 3.
3 Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre (New York: Limelight Editions, 1972).
4 Judith Malina, Poems of a Wandering Jewess (Paris: Handshake Editions, 1982).
5 See Nelcya Delanoë’s Le Raspail vert, l’American center à Paris, 1934-1994, Une histoire des avant-gardes franco-américaines (Paris: Seghers, 1994).
6 The French publisher of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959), trans. Jean-Jacques Lebel and Robert Cordier (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1966).
7 As stated by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.
8 Kazuko Shiraishi, My Floating Mother, City (New York: New Directions, 2009). Read in 1982 at the Village Voice, this poem does not seem to have been published before 2003.
9 Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968).
10 Ginsberg’s quote is taken from the foreword of a new French translation of Last Exit to Brooklyn by Jean-Pierre Carasso and Jacqueline Huet (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014).
11 See John Calder’s preface to Last Exit to Brooklyn (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968).
12 Philippe Manœuvre, introduction to Hubert Selby Jr., Village Voice reading, October 25, 1988.
13 Two epigraphs open Selby’s novel The Demon (London: Calder & Boyars, 1977): “Blessed is the man that endureth temptations . . .” James I: 12-15 and “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears,” Psalms 34:4-6.
14 Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968).
15 Selby, Seeds of Pain, Seeds of Love was a work in progress, seemingly never published.
16 William H. Gass, The Tunnel (New York: Knopf, 1995).
17 Gass, Village Voice reading, February 6, 2007.
18 Gass, The World within the Word (Boston: David Godine, 1979).
19 Gass dedicated an essay to Rainer Maria Rilke: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Knopf, 1999).
20 Gass, Village Voice reading, February 6, 2007.
21 William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic (New York: Viking, 1985).
22 Gaddis, The Recognitions (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). Translated into French by Jean Lambert (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
23 Chénetier’s articles are compiled in Au-delà du soupçon (Paris: Seuil, 1989) and Sgraffites, encres & sanguines (Paris: Off-Shore Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1994).
24 Gaddis, J R (New York: Knopf, 1975).
25 Gaddis, Village Voice reading, December 3, 1985. All Gaddis’s quotes and the Q and A session are from this reading.
26 Expression first used in 1817 by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
27 Gaddis, Gothique charpentier, trans. Marc Cholodenko (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988).
28 Sarah Gaddis, Swallow Hard (New York: Atheneum, 1990). Village Voice reading, April 23, 1991.
29 Sarah Gaddis, Swallow Hard.
30 Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991). Translated into French as Mao II by Marianne Véron (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992).
31 The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore with an afterword by Sarah Gaddis (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). The quote refers to the letter to DeLillo dated July 19, 1988, 451.
32 Hubert Nyssen, introduction to DeLillo, Village Voice reading April 2, 1992.
33 DeLillo, Mao II.
34 A reference to the 1989 fatwa or death sentence pronounced by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini against the Indian-born British-American author Salman Rushdie.
1 This title inspired by Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage, 1984).
2 Jay McInerney, Brightness Falls (New York: Knopf, 1992).
3 Not to be confused with Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), which includes City of Glass (1985), the first of the three novellas.
4 McInerney, Story of My Life (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988). Village Voice reading, November 3, 1993.
5 McInerney, Trente ans et des poussières, trans. Jean-Pierre Carasso and Jacqueline Huet (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1993).
6 McInerney, Story of My Life.
7 Nod to neophyte bondsman and narrator Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
8 Jerome Charyn, El Bronx (New York: Mysterious Press, 1997). Village Voice reading, May 7, 1997.
9 Charyn, Village Voice reading of Paradise Men (New York: Mysterious Press, 1987), October 14, 1988.
10 Charyn, Village Voice reading of Death of a Tango King (New York: New York University Press, 1998), January 26, 1999.
11 Charyn, Village Voice reading of El Bronx.
12 Richard Price, Clockers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). Nominated for the National Book Award and adapted to the screen in 1995.
13 Price’s novel features a fictive city in the north of the Great New York, but, at his reading, the author referred to it as the Bronx.
14 Price, Village Voice reading, October 22, 1993.
15 Charyn, Movie Land: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1989).
16 James Ellroy, American Tabloid (New York: Knopf, 1995).
1 Russell Banks interviewed in France-Culture, November 11, 2016.
2 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking, 1957).
3 Douglas Kennedy, at the presentation of his novels The Pursuit of Happiness and Leaving the World, Village Voice readings, May 11, 2001, and September 24, 2009.
4 Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).
5 Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart (New York: Grove Press, 1990).
6 Gifford, Landscape with Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves (New York: Dutton, 1980), inspired by Sei Shōnagon, the first-century Japanese author of The Pillow Book.
7 Gifford, Port Tropique (Berkeley, CA: Black Lizard Press, 1980).
8 Gifford, The Imagination of the Heart (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009). In fact, it was not to be the last sequel. At the request of his readers, in 2015, under the title The Up-Down, the author published the final episode, this time focusing on Pace, Sailor and Lula’s son.
9 The South and Chicago refer to the places where the author grew up and lived for periods of his life.
10 David Payne, Gravesend Light (New York: Knopf, 2000). Translated into French by Delphine Le Chevalier and Jean-Louis Chevalier as Le phare d’un monde flottant (Paris: Belfond, 2001).
11 John Biguenet, Oyster, HarperCollins US, New York 2002, published in French as Le Secret du bayou, tr:trans. France Camus-Pichon, Albin Michel, Paris, 2008.
12 Biguenet’s quotes are from his Village Voice reading, July 26, 2010.
13 Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
14 Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (New York: Random House, 2008). Village Voice reading, March 17, 2009.
15 Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
16 Williams, Village Voice reading, December 19, 2009.
1 Raymond Carver interviewed by David Applefield in Frank, Winter 1987-1988.
2 Jim Harrison, Julip (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
3 Harrison, Village Voice reading, May 16, 1995.
4 Brice Matthieussent, introduction to Jim Harrison, Village Voice reading, May 16, 1995.
5 Jim Harrison, Dalva (New York: Washington Square Press, 1989).
6 Harrison, Village Voice reading, May 16, 1995.
7 Harrison was horrified by the violence escalating in America: “Anyone can buy an AK-47, firing up to 300 shots a second. The people associated with the NRA are mostly right-wingers. You cross the frontier to Toronto, Canada, with more Black people than Detroit; it has thirty killed per year while Detroit [has] up to 800-900. The NRA is all whites, and right-wing neighborhoods are much more dangerous than Black communities.”
8 Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet, author of the poetry album Le bestiaire (1911).
9 Harrison, Village Voice reading, May 16, 1995.
10 These gardens surround the official residence of the prime minister of France.
11 Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet Please? (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976). Translated into French by François Lasquin as Tais-toi, je t’en prie (Paris: Éditions Mazarine, 1987).
12 Peter Taylor, Summons to Memphis (New York: Knopf, 1986). 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
13 Denis Hirson, Village Voice reading of White Scars: On Reading and Rites of Passage (his literary memoirs), March 15, 2007.
14 Carver in Frank, Winter 1987–88. The title “Collectors” is a play on words: they are the bailiffs who collect and also the function of the vacuum cleaner. Hence translated in French as “L’aspiration.“
15 Richard Ford, “Good Raymond,” New Yorker, October 5, 1998.
16 Raymond Carver interviewed by David Applefield in Frank, Winter 1987-1988.
17 Carver, Village Voice reading, April 9, 1987.
18 Robert Stewart, “Reimagining Raymond Carver on Film: A Talk with Robert Altman and Tess Gallagher,” New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1993.
19 Richard Ford, A Piece of My Heart (London: Collins Harvill, 1987); US date 1976.
20 Edmund White, introduction to Richard Ford, Village Voice reading, June 26, 1987.
21 Jonathan Raban, Coasting (London: Collins Harvill, 1987).
22 Raymond Carver, In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (London: Collins Harvill, 1987).
23 Tess Gallagher, “Embers” in Moon Crossing Bridge (Minneapolis, MN: GraywolfPress, 1992).
24 Richard Ford, Rock Springs: Stories (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987).
25 Ford, “Good Raymond,” New Yorker, October 5, 1998.
26 Ibid.
27 Gérard de Nerval was an important poetic figure of French Romanticism.
28 Edmund White, introduction to Richard Ford, Village Voice reading, March 29, 1989.
29 Ford, Village Voice reading, March 29, 1989.
30 Ford, Village Voice reading of The Lay of the Land, September 16, 2008.
31 Ford, the Bascombe trilogy: The Sportswriter (New York: Random House, 1986), Independence Day (New York: Knopf, 1995), and The Lay of the Land (New York: Knopf, 2006).
32 Ford, Village Voice reading, Independence Day, March 7, 1996.
33 Ford’s reading from The Lay of the Land, September 16, 2008.
34 Russell Banks, Continental Drift (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
35 Interview with Raphael Bourgois, France Culture, October 9, 2016.
36 Banks, The Darling (New York: Harper & Row, 2004), translated into French as American Darling by Pierre Furlan (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005).
37 Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
38 Banks, The Reserve (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
39 “I am beautiful as a dream of stone,” epigraph adapted from Baudelaire’s poem “La beauté” in Les Fleurs du Mal.
40 Character inspired by the Canadian artist Rockwell Kent, famed painter and illustrator of Melville’s Moby Dick.
41 Banks, Village Voice reading, March 4, 2008.
1 Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
2 Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); the paperback edition: Tête-à-Tête, The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006).
3 All quotes are from Rowley’s reading.
4 Bianca Lamblin, Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée (Paris: Balland, 2006), translated into English by Julie Plovnick as A Disgraceful Affair (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996).
5 Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
6 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 285.
7 Hazel Rowley, Village Voice reading, January 12, 2006.
8 “My books are voyages, risky voyages, involving a great deal of passion on my part,” writes Rowley in “The Ups, the Downs: My Life as a Biographer,” Australian Book Review, July-August 2007.
9 Kathleen Spivack about her friend Hazel Rowley.
10 Le Monde, October 19, 2006.
11 Claude Lanzmann in The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) refers to Rowley’s Tête-à-Tête as “the umpteenth American biography of the Sartre/de Beauvoir partnership, made up entirely of petty spite and sordid rumors intended for an ignorant public,” 160.
12 Serge Rezvani, Le testament amoureux (Paris: Éditions Stock, ١٩٨١).
13 Rowley, “Censorship in France” in The American Scholar, December 2008. The fate of Rowley’s biography is also referenced in Magnificent Obsessions: Honouring the Lives of Hazel Rowley, ed. Rosemary Lloyd and Jean Fornasiero (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
14 All quotes are from Rowley, Village Voice reading, 2005.
15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali incurred the same risk as her friend, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist in 2004, and before him, Salman Rushdie, the victim of a fatwa, his books burned in public places in several countries, survivor of multiple assassination attempts.
16 Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Le deuxième sexe. A first translation had been published in the United States in 1953, but with cuts and alterations reflecting a decade when the American woman was glorified as homemaker, housewife, and mother.
17 Rowley’s long-standing relationship with the Village Voice is cited in an article she wrote, published in The Australian Literary Review, December 2007, reproduced in “It Takes a Village” in Bookforum, February/March 2008.
18 Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
19 Rowley, “The Ups, the Downs, My Life as a Biographer,” annual lecture, La Trobe University, 2007.
20 James Joyce, “The Dead” in Dubliners, annotated edition (New York: Penguin, 1992).
21 Grace Paley, “A Poem about Storytelling,” http ://voetica.comVoetica (blog), https://voetica.com/poem/4864
22 Paley, Just as I Thought (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), translated into French by Suzanne Mayoux as C’est bien ce que je pensais (Paris: Rivages, 1999).
23 Noëlle Batt, author of Grace Paley, Conteuse des destins ordinaires (Paris: Éditions Belin, 1998).
24 This statement from the Q and A refers to her reading of November 23, 1996, when President Clinton had just been reelected. He had signed the new memo on affirmative action, but there was also the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building with 168 people killed (1995); Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March of African American men on Washington, D.C. (1995); and the acquittal of the African American murder suspect O. J. Simpson (1995). These events further exacerbated racial tensions in the US.
25 Rich, The School among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
26 Ellen Hinsey, Cities of Memory (London & New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
27 Ellen Hinsey, introduction to Adrienne Rich, Village Voice reading, July 18, 2006.
28 Rich, “The Art of Translation,” American Poetry Review, vol. 27, no. 3.
29 The French poet and translator Claire Malroux and translators Maria Luisa Moretti and Marisol Sánchez Gomez who had flown to Paris from Italy and Spain to meet the poet in person for the first time.
30 Adrienne Rich, Village Voice reading, 2006.
31 Ibid. In “Poetry and Experience” (1965), Rich writes “I have to say that what I know I know through making poems,” from Poetry and Prose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993).
32 Rich, The School among the Ruins, 22.
33 The term “not” is underlined by the author.
34 Sontag, Village Voice reading, March 28, 2002.
35 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
36 Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
37 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
38 Sontag, The Volcano Lover (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992).
39 Sontag, In America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
40 Sontag, Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
41 We had a closed-circuit system that allowed people to follow the reading from everywhere in the bookshop.
42 Chantal Thomas is a prize-winning novelist, playwright, and author of essays on Sade, Casanova, and Thomas Bernhard, among others, and now a member of the Académie Française.
43 Sontag, “Homage to Halliburton” in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
44 Elizabeth Bishop, one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, traveled widely and settled in Brazil where she lived for many years.
45 Allusion to Sontag’s first novels: The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967).
46 In 1993, Sontag staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during its siege and under heavy shelling.
47 Susan Sontag, “Looking at War,” New Yorker, December 1, 2002.
48 David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008).
1 The Clouds Threw This Light: Contemporary Native American Poetry, ed. Phillip Foss (Santa Fe, NM: Institute of American Indian Arts Press, 1983).
2 See Edouard Roditi, Part I, Chapter 3.
3 William Jay Smith, The World below the Window: Poems 1937-1997 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); the author’s reading was introduced by Carolyn Kizer, June 4, 1998.
4 N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), translated into French by Yves Berger as La maison de l’aube (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
5 Francis Geffard, founder of Terre indienne, an imprint of the publishing house Albin Michel, and of the biennial Festival America in Vincennes that has been showcasing authors from South, Central, and North America since 2002.
6 James Welch, Winter in the Blood (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); translated into French by Michel Lederer as L’hiver dans le sang (Paris: Terre indienne, Albin Michel, 1992).
7 Welch, Fools Crow (New York: Viking, 1986).
8 James Welch’s Q and A session, Village Voice reading, May 10, 1992.
9 Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1984).
10 Joëlle Rostkowski, Le renouveau indien aux Etats-Unis, un siècle de reconquêtes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986).
11 Marc Chénetier, professor of American literature at Université de Paris 7-Denis Diderot.
12 Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen (New York: Henry Holt, 1986).
13 Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (New York: Henry Holt, 1987).
14 Peter Nabokov, Where the Lighting Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (New York: Viking, 2006). Translated into French by Marie-France Girod as Là où la foudre frappe, lieux sacrés de l’Amérique indienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008).
15 Erdrich, reading from The Plague of Doves (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
16 David Treuer, The Hiawatha (New York: Picador USA, 1999). The title refers to the name of the Chicago Railway Company where the protagonist’s younger brother used to work. Translated into French by Marie-Claire Pasquier as Comme un frère (Paris: Albin Michel, Terres d’Amérique, 2002). The French title hints at the novel’s plot, i.e., a Cain and Abel tragedy.
17 Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey through Reservation Life (New York: Grove Press Atlantic, 2012), 4.
18 David Treuer, The Hiawatha.
19 David Treuer’s Q and A session, Village Voice reading, May 15, 2002.
1 Morrison was in conversation with theater director Peter Sellars who staged performances of Desdemona, based on the libretto by Morrison. This “literary and musical collaboration” premiered at the Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, October 13, 2011.
2 Jake Lamar, Village Voice reading, January 17, 1995.
3 Lamar, Bourgeois Blues (New York: Plume, 1992).
4 Lamar, Close to the Bone (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999).
5 Bob Swaim taught film studies at the American University of Paris. He is the director of, among others, the documentary film Lumières noires (2006), on the Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs, Paris, 1956, reported by James Baldwin in “Princes and Powers,” Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 143.
6 John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). Translated into French by Marianne Guénot as Suis-je le gardien de mon frère? (Paris: Jacques Bertoin Éditeur, 1992).
7 Wideman, Village Voice reading, February 2, 1992.
8 Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
9 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones, reprint from Random House Edition (1959) with an afterword by Mary Helen Washington (New York: The Feminist Press, 1981).
10 Marshall, Fille noire, pierre sombre, trans. Jean-Pierre Carasso (Paris: Éditions Balland, 1983).
11 Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). This novel was mentioned by the author at her later presentation of Hottentot Venus (New York: Doubleday, 2003) at the Village Voice, April 8, 2004.
12 Jayne Cortez, Firespitter (New York: Bola Press, 1982). Village Voice reading, November 13, 1984.
13 Sapphire, Push (New York: Knopf, 1996). Translated into French by Jean-Pierre Carasso as Precious, Sapphire’s protagonist (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1997).
14 Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987). Translated into French by Hortense Chabrier and Sylvia Rué (Paris: Christian Bourgois, Éditeur, 1989).
15 Michel Fabre, author of La rive noire, de Harlem à la Seine (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1985); Richard Wright, La quête inachevée (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1973, 1986); Geneviève Fabre, Le Théâtre noir aux Etats-Unis (Paris: CNRS, 1982).
16 Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987). Pulitzer Prize 1988.
17 Barbara Hendricks, Lifting My Voice: A Memoir (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 375.
1 C. P. Cavafy’s poem “The City,” quoted in Andre Aciman’s “Alexandria: The Capital of Memory” in False Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
2 Aciman, Eight White Nights (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
3 Aciman, False Papers.
4 Renaud Machart, Village Voice reading, November 5, 2010.
5 Aciman, Eight White Nights, 33-34.
6 Aciman, Eight White Nights, 37.
7 Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989).
8 Tan, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003). Village Voice reading, June 2, 2005.
9 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
10 Kincaid, Village Voice reading, January 14, 2000.
11 Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). Translated into French by Jean-Pierre Carasso and Jacqueline Huet as Mon frère (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2000).
12 Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996).
13 Kincaid, Village Voice reading, 2000.
14 Dinaw Mengestu, “Why the Expats Left Paris,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2008.
15 Mengestu, How to Read the Air (New York: Riverhead, 2010).
16 Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (New York: Riverhead, 2007).
17 Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007). Translated into French by Laurence Viallet as La brève et merveilleuse vie d’Oscar Wao (Paris: Plon, 2009).
18 Evelyn Ch’ien, Weird English (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
19 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003.
20 Goli Taraghi, A Mansion in the Sky: Short Stories (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2003); French publication: La Maison de Shemiran (Arles: Actes Sud, 2003).
21 Nafisi, Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories, (New York: Random House, 2008). Translated into French by Marie-Hélène Dumas as Mémoires captives (Paris: Plon, 2009).
1 Epigraph inspired by “Aschenglorie,” Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000): “No one / bears witness for the / witness.”
2 Amy Bloom, Away (London: Granta Books, 2007). Village Voice reading, June 26, 2008.
3 Saul Bellow, Dangling Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944).
4 Gwen Edelman, War Story (New York: Riverhead, 2001). Translated into French by Anne Damour as Dernier refuge avant la nuit (Paris: Belfond, 2002).
5 Edelman, The Train to Warsaw (New York: Grove Press, 2014).
6 Edelman, Village Voice reading, September 20, 2001.
7 Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm (New York: Knopf, 1987).
8 Gilbert and Sullivan, Victorian-era theatrical partnership, Gilbert as dramatist and Sullivan as composer of operas and comic operas.
9 Mavis Gallant, letter to me, July 23, 2005.
10 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
11 Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).
12 Krauss, Great House (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). Translated into French by Paule Guivarch as La grande maison (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2011).
13 Krauss’s Q and A session from her Village Voice reading, April 27, 2011.
14 Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
15 Mendelsohn is the author of two academic works, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays (1994) and The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (2000).
16 W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (published in German in 1992 and in English in 1996) is remarkable for its innovative use of text with black and white photos.
1 This poem was later included in Adam Zagajewski’s Without End: New and Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). An award-winning Polish poet, Zagajewski divided his time among his native Poland, Paris, and the US where he taught.
2 Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Entirely devoted to Jacques Derrida, our evening started with a presentation by the French writer Hélène Cixous of her Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). In it, Cixous explores through language the meaning of being Jewish for someone like Derrida, the philosopher who “scoffed at boundaries and fixed identities.” The event was moderated by Bie Brahic, Canadian poet and English translator of Cixous’s works.
3 “Le Monde des lumières à venir” in Un Jour Derrida, Editions de la bibliothèque publique d’information, November 2005.
4 Nishant Irudayadason, “Thinking a World without Boundaries: Derrida and Tirumular, an Endeavour of Comparative Philosophy” (dissertation, Université Paris-Est, 2008), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278634579_Thinking_a_world_beyond_boundaries_Derrida_and_Tirumular_an_endeavor_of_comparative_philosophy.
1 An institution with a rich cultural tradition in France since 1944, the British Council organized a series of encounters with British writers. Christine Jordis, author of several books on English literature, was in charge of this program from 1979 to 1991.
2 David Lodge, Village Voice reading, January 8, 1990.
3 Lodge’s Campus Trilogy includes Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988), all originally published by Secker and Warburg, London.
4 A. S. Byatt: Possession: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). Winner of the Booker Prize that same year.
5 Byatt, Village Voice reading, September 14, 1993.
6 Ibid.
7 David Lodge, Thinks (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001).
8 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).
1 Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). His father had immigrated to England in the wake of the partition of Pakistan from India.
2 Kureishi, Contre son coeur, trans. Jean Rosenthal (Paris: Éditions Christian Bourgois, 2005).
3 Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2007). Village Voice reading, October 2, 2008.
4 Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010). Village Voice reading, January 27, 2011.
5 Abha Dawesar, Babyji, (New York: Random House, 2005). Translated into French by Isabelle Reinharez (Paris: Éditions Heloïse d’Ormesson, 2004).
6 Dawesar, Miniplanner (Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press, 2000).
7 Dawesar, Village Voice reading, November 11, 2007.
8 Tarun Tejpal, The Alchemy of Desire (London: Picador, 2005), translated into French by Annick Le Goyat as Loin de chandigar (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2005).
9 Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2009). Translated into French by Annick Le Goyat as Histoire de mes assassins (Paris: Buchet-
Chastel, 2009).
1 The Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories, ed. Denis Hirson and Martin Trump (London: Heinemann, 1994).
2 Denis Hirson, The House Next Door to Africa (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987).
3 Hirson, I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2004).
4 Hirson, We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2005).
5 Louise Klapisch, letter to me, dated June 12, 2005.
6 Hirson, The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011). Village Voice reading, October 8, 2011.
7 Hirson, The House Next Door to Africa. Village Voice reading, April 21, 1988.
8 Hirson, White Scars: On Reading and Rites of Passage (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2006). Village Voice reading, March 15, 2007.
9 Ibid.
10 Hirson, We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2005). Village Voice reading, March 23, 2006.
11 Ibid.
12 Hirson, Village Voice reading, October 8, 2011.
13 Ibid.
14 Hirson, Village Voice reading, March 23, 2006.
15 Hirson, Village Voice reading, October 8, 2011.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Breyten Breytenbach, In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy: Selected Poems, trans. Denis Hirson (London: Calder Publications, 1978).
19 Breyten Breytenbach, Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems 1964-2006 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).
20 Breytenbach, Village Voice reading, July 1, 2008.
21 Nelson Mandela and Mandla Langa, Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years (London: Macmillan, 2017).
22 ANC: African National Congress, the political party led by Nelson Mandela which carried him to power.
23 Mandla Langa, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2008, 2011).
24 Langa, Village Voice reading, March 17, 2011.
25 Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), launched at the Village Voice on the occasion of its French publication, Un docteur irréprochable, trans. Hélène Papot (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2005). He received the Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, (London: Chatto & Windus, 2021.)
26 Galgut in conversation with Denis Hirson, Village Voice reading, April 4, 2005.
1 Tim Winton, Dirt Music (London: Picador, 2002). Translated into French by Nadine Gassie as Par-dessus le bord du monde (Paris: Rivages, 2004).
2 Tim Winton, Village Voice reading, March 30, 2004.
3 Claire Messud, The Last Life (London: Picador, 1999), about a French-Algerian family haunted by having to leave their native country and past life due to the outbreak of the Algerian War.
4 Julia Leigh, The Hunter (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), originally published by Penguin Australia in 1999.
1 Anne Tremblay, The Montreal Gazette, August 10, 1985.
2 Mavis Gallant, see Part I, Chapter 7.
3 Tremblay, The Montreal Gazette, August 10, 1985.
4 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985).
5 Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996). Translated into French by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch as Captive (Paris: Éditions ١٠/١٨, ١٩٩٨). Village Voice joint reading with Richard Ford, April ٥, ١٩٩٨.
6 Richard Ford, Women with Men, (New York: Knopf, 1997); In French: Une situation difficile, trans. Suzanne Mayoux (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1998).
7 Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001).
8 Nancy Huston, see Part I, Chapter 7.
9 Jane Urquhart, Village Voice reading, April, 7, 2005.
10 Matt Cohen, Nadine (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Canada, 1986) and Emotional Arithmetic (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990). Village Voice reading, November 9, 1995.
11 Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart 1996). Village Voice reading, September 17, 1998.
12 Mavis Gallant, letter to me, October 24, 2004.
13 Michael Ondaatje, Secular Love (Toronto: Coach House, 1984) and Running in the Family (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982). Village Voice reading, April 9, 1986.
14 Ondaatje, Divisadero (New York: Knopf, 2007). Village Voice reading, September 6, 2007.
15 Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (New York: Knopf, 2000).
16 Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Knopf, 1992). Translated into French by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek as L’homme flambé (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 1992). Village Voice reading, February 17, 1993. A few years later, Ondaatje was to publish Warlight, his fourth novel about war (New York: Knopf, 2018 ).
17 Ondaatje, Q and A session, Village Voice reading of The English Patient, February 17, 1993.
18 Hazel Rowley, “It Takes a Village,” in Bookforum, February/March 2008.
19 Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table (New York: Knopf, 2011).
20 Ondaatje, Q and A session, Village Voice reading of The Cat’s Table, June 28, 2012.
1 Stephen Spender, The Temple (London: Faber & Faber, 1988).
2 Foreword to the anthology 21+1: Poètes Américains d’aujourd’hui (Montpellier: Delta, 1986).
3 Village Voice reading, June 13, 1986. Joseph Simas had translated French poet Anne-Marie Albiach’s Mezza voce, and Cole Swensen, Emmanuel Hocquard’s L’invention du verre. Conversely, Emmanuel Hocquard had translated Michael Palmer, Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Keith Waldrop.
4 Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), French poet, novelist, and playwright.
5 Harry Mathews, Village Voice reading, May 13, 1986.
6 John Ashbery, Flow Chart (New York: Knopf, 1991). Village Voice reading, June 26, 1992.
7 In my copy of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), Mathews inscribed the words “Surprise and inevitability” that convey the spirit of this novel and his work in general.
8 Mathews, “The Dialect of the Tribe,” first published in Country Cooking, reprinted in The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002).
9 Mathews, Village Voice reading, May 13, 1986. For the author, the process of writing is to be compared to the composer’s art. Both he and Roussel had pursued studies in music.
10 Georges Perec’s novel La disparition was to be translated in its entirety by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (London: Harvill Press, 1994).
11 Mathews, Village Voice reading, May 13, 1986.
12 Edmund White’s introduction to Harry Mathews, Village Voice reading, May 13, 1986.
13 William Faulkner, interview in the Paris Review, Issue 12, Spring 1956.
14 “Paris, elegant gray . . .” Marilyn Hacker, “Explication de Texte” in Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2000 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003)
15 Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). The author refers to Gertrude Stein’s definition of poetry: “Poetry is nouns, prose is verbs,” p. 5.
16 Marilyn Hacker, Squares and Courtyards (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
17 Hacker, “Rêve Champêtre” in Desesperanto (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
18 Hacker, “Going Back to the River” in Going Back to the River: Poems (New York: Random House, 1990). Translated into French by Jean Migrenne as Fleuves et retours (Paris: Éditions Amiot-Lenganey, 1993).
19 Mavis Gallant, see Part I, Chapter 7.
20 Hacker, Village Voice reading, April 9, 1987.
21 Margo Berdeshevsky, But A Passage in Wilderness (Rhinebeck, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2007). Village Voice reading, March 8, 2008.
22 Berdeshevsky, “Whom Beggars Call” in But A Passage in Wilderness.
23 Marie Ponsot, “For My Old Self, at Notre Dame de Paris: fluctuat nec mergitur,” Paris Review, Issue 133, Winter 1994.
24 Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2012).
25 Kathleen Spivack, A History of Yearning, Vol. XX, N° 1, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Milwood VA, 2010.
26 Anthem for Doomed Youth, an exhibit organized by the Imperial War Museum in London in 2003. The title of her poem refers to Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” one of the emblematic British poems of World War I.
27 C. K. Williams, Village Voice reading, October 14, 2010, for the launch of Wait (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
28 Williams, Flesh and Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987); National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1987).
29 Williams, Repair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2000). Village Voice reading, December 5, 1999. Introduced by Adam Zagajewski and attended by John Felstiner, translator and biographer of the poet Paul Celan and others.
30 Williams, The Singing (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); National Book Award (2003).
31 Williams, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
32 Williams, On Whitman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
33 Blumenthal’s reference to the American poet William Carlos Williams.
34 C. K. Williams, Village Voice reading, November 6, 2003.
35 Williams, Wait (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
36 Williams, Wait. Village Voice reading, October 14, 2010.
37 Remark made during his presentation of his essay On Whitman, Village Voice reading, October 14, 2010.
38 Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2010).
39 Williams, “Marina” in Wait. Village Voice reading, 2010.
40 Williams, “The Foundation” in Wait.
41 Carolyn Kizer, introduction to Williams’s presentation of his collection Flesh and Blood, Village Voice, 1987.
42 Ellen Hinsey, The White Fire of Time (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Village Voice reading, November 21, 2002.
43 Hinsey, Village Voice reading, November 21, 2002.
44 Hinsey, Cities of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (1995).
45 Hinsey, Update on the Descent (Hexham, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2009); Village Voice reading, June 4, 2009.
46 Hinsey conducted a series of interviews with Toma Venclova collected in Magnetic North (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, and Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2017).
47 Carol Pratl, see Part I, Chapter 3.
48 Denis Hirson, introduction to Ellen Hinsey, Village Voice reading, June 6, 1996. See Part IV, Chapter 23.
49 Denis Hirson, introduction to Ellen Hinsey, Village Voice reading, June 6, 1996.
50 Hinsey, “Trains at Night” in Cities of Memory.
51 Hinsey, “The Art of Measuring Light” in Cities of Memory.
52 Hinsey, “Testimony on What is Important” in Update on the Descent.
53 Hinsey, Village Voice reading, June 4, 2009.
54 Hinsey, “Interdiction” in Update on the Descent.
55 A few years later, Ellen would publish Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (New York: Telos Press, 2017).
56 Michèle Laforest, novelist and poet, gave several readings at the Village Voice. The translator of Amos Tutuola in French, she invited the Nigerian author to read at our bookstore from The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Village Voice reading, May 21, 1985.
57 W. S. Merwin, The Vixen: Poems (New York: Knopf, 1996).
58 Merwin, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwest France (New York: Knopf, 1992).
59 Causse perdu: a secluded limestone plateau which sounds like “cause perdue” in French or “lost cause.”
60 Merwin, The Pupil: Poems (New York: Knopf, 2001). Village Voice reading, May 27, 2002.
61 Merwin, The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2002).
62 After World War II, Ezra Pound was locked in this hospital in Washington, D.C., largely because of his radio broadcasts on Italian public radio in support of Mussolini and fascism.
63 Merwin, The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2002). Village Voice reading, May 27, 2002.
64 Merwin, Village Voice reading, May 27, 2002, recalling the words of Ezra Pound during their conversation at St Elizabeths in Washington, D.C.
65 Merwin, Selected Translations (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2013).
66 Merwin, Village Voice reading, May 27, 2002.
67 A distinguished and prolific author and translator, Luc de Goustine introduced Merwin to the French public through La renarde (Perigueux: Éditions Fanlac, 2004), his luminous translation of The Vixen.
68 Michael Taylor, American poet, translator, and editor of a bilingual edition of Merwin’s prose and poems, L’appel du Causse (Perigueux: Éditions Fanlac, 2013).
69 Merwin, “Walker,” “Old Sound,” and “Snake” in The Vixen: Poems (New York: Knopf, 1996).
70 Merwin, “The Nomad Flute” in The Shadow of Sirius (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
71 Also quoted by Terry Tempest Williams in The Hour of Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 360.
72 “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree . . .”, Merwin, “Place” in The Rain in the Trees (New York: Knopf, 1988).
1 Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
2 Title borrowed from Andrea Weiss, Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank (San Francisco: Harper, 1995). See Part I, Chapter 2.
3 Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See Part I, Chapter 8. Kaplan is also the author of French Lessons, a memoir of her own junior year in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
1 Susan Hermann launched our tearoom. See her article “The Renaissance of Salons de thé in Paris,” Paris Passion, September-October 1982.