Category: French Book News

French books, interviews, culture

BookBlast® France | Paris Burning, Paris Brûle, Georgia de Chamberet

Is Paris burning? I arrived in the capital the day after the fourth Saturday of gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests in the 8th, 17th and 16th arrondissements.

1848, 1968, 2005 . . . the French have a habit of getting out on to city streets to protest against the state machine and its politicians. The recently published work Une histoire populaire de la France du XIVe siècle à nos jours  (A history of working-class France from the fourteenth century to the present day) by Gérard Noiriel is an essential read. Not yet available in English, perhaps a canny British publisher will pick it up.
 Continue reading BookBlast® France | Paris Burning, Paris Brûle, Georgia de Chamberet

BookBlast® France | Top 5 French Reads June, 2018

During a recent trip to Paris I indulged my compulsive book browsing and buying by visiting some of my favourite bookshops. They are plentiful and varied since France enjoys a fixed minimum price agreement unlike the UK where the Net Book Agreement was abolished in 1997 leading to the closure of over 500 independent bookshops, along with chains such as Dillons, Borders and Books etc. The success or failure of a book now largely lies in the hands of supermarkets, Waterstones and Amazon.
Here are a few finds for the Francophile literary flâneurs among you.
@AuDiableVauvert @ediSens_edition @EditionsdelAube @Diacritik @Gallimard @GlenatBD @_WProject_

Shredded: Life After Terror by Philippe Lançon (Gallimard)

philippe lancon bookblast france“My book is not a narrative about Islamism or the state of the health service — subjects about which I am not sufficiently well-informed — it is a personal and intimate narrative. It is the story of a man who was the victim of a terrorist attack, who spent nine months in hospital, and who recounts as accurately as possible, and I hope with a lightness of touch, how this attack and his hospital stay changed his life and the lives of those around him; his feelings, his sensations, his memory, his body and his somatic perceptions, his relationship to music, painting, how he breathes and writes.” — Philippe Lançon Continue reading BookBlast® France | Top 5 French Reads June, 2018

Spotlight | Staging France: Beyond Words Festival of French Literature, London SW7

Cafés, books and debate are a mainstay of French culture in a uniquely seductive way, so to savour some French flair, head to the Institut français in London this week for the second Beyond Words Festival. Forty writers, translators, actors, musicians and journalists are taking part in talks and live performances, presenting iconic films, and engaging the broader public, not just Francophiles.

How Paris changed the world

Baudelaire looked at what being a bohemian meant and invented the word “modern”; Hemingway made Paris an obligatory destination for aspiring young American writers on their European Grand Tour; the French capital was home to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco; and Nabokov was published there.

philippe gras photo bookblast diaryMay 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of May 1968 when French workers joined student protesters in Paris with a one-day general strike. Although the government was not overthrown, the protests ushered in a cultural revolution.

The Photo Exhibition AU COEUR DE MAI ’68 by the late French photographer Philippe Gras tells the story of May ’68, fifty years after the event. There is free access to the exhibition at the Institut français during La Médiathèque’s opening hours, until 19 May. Continue reading Spotlight | Staging France: Beyond Words Festival of French Literature, London SW7

Communiqué de Presse | LA TABLE RONDE 19-04-2018 | Croquis d’une vie de bohème, Lesley Blanch

lesley blanch la table ronde edition 2018CROQUIS D’UNE VIE DE BOHÈME | Lesley Blanch

Préfacé et présenté par Georgia de Chamberet | Traduit de l’anglais par Lucien d’Azay

Écrivain et voyageuse, fascinée par l’Orient, Lesley Blanch est restée célèbre en Angleterre pour Vers les rives sauvages de l’amour, un quartet biographique où elle raconte la vie d’aventurières extravagantes, à son image. Après une enfance dans une famille bourgeoise de Londres à l’époque édouardienne, cette Anglaise spirituelle et raffinée mena une vie passablement nomade; elle était décoratrice de théâtre et rédactrice de l’édition britannique de Vogue quand elle épousa Romain Gary pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La carrière diplomatique de celui-ci les conduisit à Paris, à Sofia, à New York, en Bolivie et enfin à Hollywood où Lesley Blanch côtoya quantité de stars et travailla avec George Cukor.

Continue reading Communiqué de Presse | LA TABLE RONDE 19-04-2018 | Croquis d’une vie de bohème, Lesley Blanch

Breaking News | Where have all the intellectuals gone? | Librairie La Page 20.3.2018

Intellectuals have never had a more important contribution to make to culture and to democracy than now, in our age of post truth politics, trumpery and newspeak. We need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other in more profound ways than tweeting soundbites.

Intellectuals are a rare breed however there have been a number of sightings in past months. Some of these controversial individuals are likely to be found in South Kensington next Tuesday 20 March at 6.30pm since Pascal Bacqué will be at Librairie La Page, 7 Harrington Road, London, SW7 discussing his epic and hallucinatory novel just published by Massot éditions.

winston churchill in his daimlerOf War, Mankind and Planet Earth is a madly ambitious, hypnotic 440 page novel; the first of five volumes. Fifteen years of research and five very different drafts took Pascal Bacqué on a journey through his life and that of the world. Taking in 6000 years of history, he travels through the centuries to create a pot pourri of people, places and events, telling the never-ending story of war through the ages.

« You can get totally immersed in this book, play mind games, dream, admire and disagree . . . It is a book to be read aloud, a book on which to meditate, to be listened to with the third ear, to be read in one sitting, backwards, fast, or on edge of your chair . . . It is an extraordinary book, an addictive narrative which cannot be put down and which, once read, possesses you. » Bernard-Henri Lévy

World War Two and the Holocaust take centre stage. 1945: the end game is being played out. Ian Bute and Tolkien travel East with Churchill, and as they do so the secrets of ancient, millennial, old Europe emerge from the rubble. On their journey they encounter seventy archetypal men from through the ages, and rub shoulders with all the major world figures of literature, music and politics. A parallel narrative gives an added Tolkienesque dimension to this odyssey from West to East, culminating in a dramatic showdown in a clash of empires. 

Pascal BacquéThe event at Librairie La Page has been arranged in collaboration with the Hexagon Society, a centre for French and English cross-cultural exchange that facilitates encounters between thinkers and artists and the general public.

@EditionsMassot @BHL @LIBRAIRIELAPAGE

Pascal Bacqué is a poet, a writer, and artistic collaborator and a devotee of the Talmud. He has worked as director of the collection « Libelles » for L’âge d’Homme, as a member of the editorial board of the magazine La Règle du Jeu, and as director of the French Talmudic College with René Lévy. His works include Imperium (L’âge d’Homme, 2007), The Legend of Elijah (L’âge d’Homme, 2011), Ode to Armageddon (L’âge d’Homme, 2014).

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