Spotlight | Tatiana de Rosnay, Alicia Drake & Daughters of Simone de Beauvoir | Beyond Words French Literature Festival 2019

So many books have been written with Paris as a character and there are so many clichés about its seductive beauty, as a writer you need to find your Paris and step away from the great dark magnet that it is. Often the dark Paris is what is most interesting.” Alicia Drake

The vision of Paris as an intellectual’s city with writers and artists chain-smoking on café terraces, arguing about literature, art and Existentialism has been consigned to the attic by most contemporary novelists at work today who are worth reading. Tatiana de Rosnay and Alicia Drake are two such writers whose vision of the City of Light is anything but a picture postcard. They graced the stage at this year’s Beyond Words French Literature Festival at the French Institute in South Kensington.

There is, of course, some superb non fiction on offer which gives a genuine, riveting, and rather more leftfield take beyond the usual stereotypical reads – my favourite being the memoirs of late, great John Calder who I was lucky enough to know. The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-war Literary Scene is essential reading for anyone curious about visionary entrepreneurs operating in the publishing industry of yesteryear, and the Paris-London-New York golden triangle.

A forgotten Paris is described by the late Lesley Blanch in her memoirs On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life (Virago) in which she describes Russian Paris of the 1920s with theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and the beleaguered capital in 1945 when she was there with her younger husband Romain Gary, ambitious and unknown. “Romain developed a hunger for the atmosphere of the studios where a circle of newer artists worked. Long evenings would be spent trudging along the icy ill-lit streets and interminable boulevards. Public transport was scarce, very few people had cars then, and we had no money for taxis, which were rare. Continue reading Spotlight | Tatiana de Rosnay, Alicia Drake & Daughters of Simone de Beauvoir | Beyond Words French Literature Festival 2019

Spotlight | Maurice Girodias & Olympia Press | Indie Publishers Remembered

Maurice Girodias writes in his introduction to The Olympia Reader, Grove Press, 1965: “Since my earliest childhood the notion of individual freedom had been deeply rooted in me. Everything I saw or felt as I was growing up turned into a passion — a passion I shared with millions of contemporary Frenchmen, although my own brand drew me toward a form of individualist anarchy while the others usually went toward practical communism or socialism. I resented and hated l’ésprit bourgeois in all its manifestations, but I also distrusted all forms of human association.”

Maurice Girodias, purveyor of some of the best erotic writing ever published which united the obscene and the beautiful, was the son of a French mother and Jewish father from Manchester, “a silver spoonfed infant and a very poor orphan.” Jack Kahane came to Paris in the 1930s and set up the Obelisk Press to publish books in English which, thanks to a loophole in French law, could not be printed in America or England because of censorship. He published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1934, Anais Nin, Cyril Connolly, a fragment of Joyce’s work in progress, Haveth Childers Everywhere, as a limited edition. The Young and the Evil (1933) by Charles Henri-Ford and Parker Tyler depicted gay life in Harlem and Greenwich and men earning their living there — Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein praised it to the skies. Continue reading Spotlight | Maurice Girodias & Olympia Press | Indie Publishers Remembered

Interview, Proust’s Questionnaire | Gary Pulsifer, indie publisher

Gary Pulsifer has lived in the UK for 41 years. He has worked on both sides of the Atlantic – for Random House in New York and for a number of UK indies, including Writers & Readers, John Calder and Peter Owen. He founded the independent publishing house Arcadia books in 1996. Authors include: José Eduardo Agualusa (winner of the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), Lisa Appignanesi, Michael Arditti, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Bonnie Greer, Shere Hite, Erica Jong, Dominique Manotti, Lucy Popescu, Luis Sepulveda, A. Sivanandan, Alex Wheatle.

Your favourite virtue?
Loyalty.

Your favourite qualities in a man?
Machismo is always a bore in men, so a little less of that is always welcome.

Your favourite qualities in a woman?
Men and women are very similar in many ways (naturally). Women often seem more clear-headed and hard-working than their male counterparts.

For what faults do have you most tolerance?
Ignorance.

Your chief characteristic?
Hard-working. A tolerance for fools is one, followed by a loyalty to them.

Your main fault?
Procrastination. Not being tough enough. (But once you’re out, you’re out for life.) Continue reading Interview, Proust’s Questionnaire | Gary Pulsifer, indie publisher

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