French

Triangulation

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

As of this writing, the United States, which has 4.2 percent of the world’s population, accounts for nearly 30 percent of total COVID-19 mortalities. Among Americans, a common response to…

Trash, Rock, Destroy

By Lauren Elkin,

Is Virginie Despentes the French writer America needs?

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,

A young writer finds his voice on the radio

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,

A cure for constitutional crisis

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