French book news from across the Channel
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Paris.
What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
There were many books in my family home, and my parents were used to take me to the library when I was a kid. I remember Roald Dahl, a magazine for kids called Astrapi and some comics like Marion Duval.
Why do you write?
Writing helps me to think. Continue reading Interview | Clara Beaudoux | Author of the Week
La rentrée littéraire is a curious phenomenon: hundreds of new books of all genres flood French bookshops and the review pages of the literary press between the end of August and the beginning of November. It is a way for publishers to capitalize on the awards season, and at Frankfurt Book Fair in October – at which France is the guest of honour this year – as well building up a buzz leading into the Christmas period when the most books are sold.
Anglophile French friends in Paris send recommendations. And then there are wonderful talk shows about books like La grande librairie (France 5) or Jérôme Garcin’s Le Masque et la Plume (France Inter) and of course, radio France Culture – all are streamed on the web.
So here is our first curated top 5 list of five books in French for those of you looking for some French teasers from across the Channel . . . Continue reading BookBlast® France | Top 5 French Reads September, 2017
“The Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England, walked past, a cigar clamped between his teeth, in an out-at-elbow suit with corkscrewing trousers and his jacket pockets stuffed with tokens he had forgotten to cash in on his way out of the gaming room. A woman walked a step ahead of him, not turning round. She had an imperious expression and a very mobile face and wore a boater with a black ribbon. She was dripping with jewellery. Blanche said to her son, ‘Look. That’s Mademoiselle Chanel. Thanks to her we can cut our hair short without looking like servants’.” [Your Father’s Room, p. 36]
French novelist Michel Déon was born in Paris and died in Galway in 2016 at the age of 97. Admirers of Fournier and Flaubert and the world according to Proust would love his writing which is pared down and, although quintessentially French, has a universal resonance. The author of more than fifty works of fiction and non-fiction, and a member of the Académie Française, Déon was also a member of the 1950s French literary movement, ‘Les Hussards’, founded by Roger Nimier to oppose Existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre. (The group was named after Roger Nimier’s novel Le Hussard bleu – The Blue Hussar). The distinguished and controversial right-wing novelist, Paul Morand, was an inspirational figure for the group. “They form a fascinating quartet of original, cosmopolitan, witty minds, far superior to their British contemporaries, the Angry Young Men,” poet, novelist and translator, James Kirkup wrote in The Independent in 2001. Continue reading Review | Your Father’s Room, Michel Déon | Book of the Week
Summer is the time for comics and graphic novels. They are an easier read when hanging out by the pool, or on the beach, than that 624 page whopper you finally have some time for, now that it’s the holidays.
From Mad Magazine, The Beano, Billy Bunter and Asterix while growing up . . . to Charles Adams, Robert Crumb’s Kafka, Maus and Persepolis as an adult . . . comic books, and more recently, longer more complex graphic novels, are a delight. As culture has moved from being a print to a visual one, great novels like The Three Musketeers or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way are now available in comic book versions. The trend is growing and business is booming. Those literati who turn their noses up at them are missing out! Continue reading Review | Emma, Other Ways of Seeing | Massot Éditions
An early article, Beauty Victims at Le Palace by Georgia de Chamberet for 3:am magazine (2005) from the BookBlast® Archive.
During a recent trip to Paris, I mentioned to various French publishers that in the UK, nostalgia for the underground movements of the last thirty years is 
flourishing. Yet despite the outpouring of books, films, documentaries, compilation CDs and exhibitions like the Vivienne Westwood, it is obvious to me that one side of the London-New York-Paris “golden triangle” has been overlooked. Between artists there is always a cross-fertilisation of ideas, and the effect of the Parisian underground remains influential. Grace Jones learned devices for subversive performance during her time at Fabrice Emaer’s legendary club, Le Palace — the Studio 54 of its day — and Madonna was backup singer and dancer for disco star Patrick Hernandez when his hit “Born To Be Alive” went global.
I argued that people who enjoy reading, and relish the likes of Michael Bracewell, Ben Myers, Jeff Noon and Robert Elms should be given a chance to check out their French counterparts. But I was told by the French publishers that English publishers are not interested in a certain type of French culture, and translation is seen as a risky venture, so to pitch offbeat or outrageous books considered to have limited sales potential would be a waste of time. Bonjour tristesse. From idea to bookstore the reader comes last in a long line of corporate decision-makers, in a game of blind man’s bluff. Continue reading Spotlight | Beauty Victims at Le Palace | 3:AM Magazine 2005
Britain is part of Europe – like it or not! Border controls do not function when it comes to words since ideas have no borders. Books in translation disseminating knowledge and cultural awareness matter more than ever as prejudice and discrimination make an unwelcome (re)appearance on the Western stage.
As part of the build up to France’s invitation of honour to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2017, a series of discussion panels – “triangular talks” – were held on Monday 13 March at the French Institute in London. Leading book editors from Germany, France and Britain met to discuss fiction, non fiction and what the future holds. Publishers, translators, agents and scouts packed out the library at the IFRU to hear them. Lucie Campos, Head of the French Book Office, chaired the discussions.
Continue reading Spotlight | Britain and Creative Europe: what do book editors want?
Since 2004, Georgia de Chamberet has occasionally written for 3:AM Magazine.
“I am the son of a bastard who loved me. My father was a furniture dealer who collected and sold the property of deported Jews … I had to dismantle that great lie which passed for an education, word by word. Aged twenty eight, I experienced a first episode of delirium. Others followed. I was regularly interned in psychiatric hospitals … For years, I have been but the sum total of myriad questions. Today, I am sixty three years old. I am neither wise, nor cured. I am an artist. And I believe I can pass on what I have come to understand.”
A Life of Disquiet: Self-portrait of an Artist, a Son, a Madman is a powerful account of a dysfunctional father-son relationship marked by aggression and conflict, and its consequences. The book has received wall-to-wall press coverage in France, and has been a word-of-mouth success with over 40,000 copies sold to date.
“Style is not an end in itself: it is a result,” René Magritte.
A thinker, Magritte was in permanent revolution against banality and crass assumptions. He communicated his ideas through paintings, which he called “visible thoughts,” upending society’s conventions. He united the familiar in unexpected ways to create what is unfamiliar and often disturbing. Famous for playing with words and image, millions of people know his iconic painting of a pipe with the words beneath it, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“this is not a pipe“) — point being the image may be of a pipe, but the pipe is not representative of the image.
In this brave new world of twenty-first century “post-truth politics” in which image matters to an alarming degree, and words no longer need bear any relation to reality, how everyday language disguises thought; the vagueness and ambiguity of words; and the gap between words and seeing, are hot topics. Déjà vu? Magritte captured the essence of the relationship between words and image over half a century ago. The first-ever publication of his Selected Writings in English by Alma Books is long overdue, and timely.
Continue reading Review | Magritte for our time | Selected Writings | Alma Books
Join us for an evening celebrating Trailblazing Women of the 20th Century @WaterstonesPicc on publication of the Virago paperback of Lesley Blanch’s posthumous memoirs, On The Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life.
Georgia de Chamberet & Anne Sebba will discuss the bohemian life of Lesley Blanch at Waterstones, Piccadilly, London W1, Thursday 12 January, 7pm.
This event is free, but please reserve your place by email: piccadilly@waterstones.com
Editor, translator and literary consultant, Georgia de Chamberet founded BookBlast™ writing agency in 1997. She is Lesley Blanch’s god-daughter.
Daily Telegraph: This volume, edited with affection and grace by de Chamberet, is a deliciously readable monument to a writer who combined a steely resilience and capacity for hard work with an elegant frivolity and a voracious appetite for love, beauty and adventure.
Ebury Street in London’s Belgravia: a quiet, residential, affluent area. The perfect place for a bookshop where readers can enjoy peaceful browsing away from the madding crowd, and dip into some of the best French writing available in English translation. However the Belgravia Books Collective is not just a shop, but also the home of independent publishing success story, Gallic Books. It has been very much on my radar and, at last, I am going to talk to one of the founders.
Jane Aitken and Pilar Webb met when they were both working at Random House children’s, and they went on to co-found Gallic Books in 2006. Headliners Muriel Barbery (trs. Alison Anderson), Antoine Laurain (trs. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken), Michel Déon (trs. Julian Evans) and Yasmina Khadra (trs. Howard Curtis), have an enthusiastic following among discerning British readers who relish a good, well-written read from foreign shores.
Continue reading Interview | Jane Aitken, publisher, Gallic & Aardvark
