French

Trash, Rock, Destroy

By Lauren Elkin,

The writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes lives in a nondescript modern building in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. I know it well: it has a Bricorama—like a French Home Depot—on…

Fighting Dirty

By Anne Garréta, Emma Ramadan,

By Anne Garréta, from Not One Day, which was published this month by Deep Vellum. Garréta is a French novelist and a member of the Oulipo. Not One Day chronicles…

Grim Sleeper

By Michel Leiris,

By Michel Leiris (1901–90), from Nights as Day, Days as Night, a chronicle of the author’s dreams between 1923 and 1961. The book was published last month by Spurl Editions.…

The Notes of Patrick Modiano

By Peter De Jonge,

“We’ve had a bit of a crisis,” Hughes de Courson told me on a raw Parisian morning last February. I’d found him slumped at a table overlooking the cobblestones of…

Old Master

By Marcel Proust,

By Marcel Proust (1871–1922), from an essay included in Chardin and Rembrandt, which will be published next month by David Zwirner Books as part of a new series featuring exemplary…

The Joke

By Justin Smith,

By Justin E. H. Smith, from “The Fundamentals of Gelastics,” a work in progress. Smith’s latest book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (Princeton), will be published in June. In…

Brussels Spleen

By Charles Baudelaire, Translated by Richard Sieburth

From an outline for a book Charles Baudelaire planned to write on Belgium, where he lived from 1864 until shortly before his death, in 1867. The outline is published in…

Voltaire in Vichy

By Jean Guéhenno, Translated by David Ball

By Jean Guéhenno, from Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, out this month from Oxford University Press. Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a writer,…

Army of Shadows

By Marcelle Hamel-Hateau,

From a memoir written in 1944 by Marcelle Hamel-Hateau, a schoolteacher in the Norman village of Neuville-au-Plain, included in D-Day Through French Eyes, by Mary Louise Roberts, published last month…

Dissolve Congress

By Jean-Philippe Immarigeon,

Over the past five years, every industrial nation has had its own version of the same economic fight: champions of austerity on one side, advocates of social spending and economic…

Readings

By Monica Almeida,

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