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Deconstructing Édouard Levé
From the cover of the English-language edition of Autoportrait. I find myself ugly more often than handsome. I like my voice after a night out or when I have a cold. I am unacquainted with hunger. I...
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Scare Tactics: Michel Houellebecq Defends His Controversial New Book
Photo by Sylvain Bourmeau It’s 2022, and France is living in fear. The country is roiled by mysterious troubles. Regular episodes of urban violence are deliberately obscured by the media. Everything is...
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Speaking Bluntly
Colette in 1907. Two letters from Colette, who was born on this day in 1873, to her friend Marguerite Moreno. Rozven, mid-September 1924 … I should like to talk earnestly to you about your copy for...
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Divine Ordure
A master class in hailing Satan. An illustration by Félicien Rops for a bootleg edition of Là-Bas. “The odor from those incense burners is unbearable … What do they burn that smells like that?”...
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The Fabric of a Life: An Interview with Yasmina Reza
Yasmina Reza. Photo © Pascal Victor/ArtComArt Last week, Yasmina Reza, who lives in Paris, came to New York to promote the American publication of her latest novel, Happy Are the Happy. I met her in...
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Victor Hugo’s Drawings
Victor Hugo, Octopus with the initials V.H., 1866. Victor Hugo wrote poetry, novels, and drama—more than enough for any mortal—but he also made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life....
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Broken on the Wheel
A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent. The death of John Calas, depicted in an English chapbook. This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for The Marshall...
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Disagreeable Tales
In his fiction, Léon Bloy strove “to disclose the universal villainy of respectable people.”Bloy observed the vows of both poverty and suffering; he earned the nickname the Ungrateful Beggar.In his...
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What’s the Use?
Celebrity and oblivion in the Goncourt brothers.Edmund and Jules Goncourt.Few documents provide as comprehensive—or as caustic—a view of celebrity as the diary of the Goncourt brothers, Jules and...
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The Essential Detail
Emmanuel Bove’s fiction captures “a well-trodden and forever alienating Paris.”Emmanuel Bove.Emmanuel Bove was a master of hyperobjectivity. His characters, drawn from all classes, are often paralyzed...
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The Phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement
In an unremarkable section of Paris, Roger Caillois saw hiding places for “floating beings.”Caillois ca. 1975. Photo: R. MinnaertPity the Fifteenth! Paris’s most populous arrondissement is also one of...
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Mount Analogue
After I wrote about Daphne du Maurier’s “Monte Verità” in September, a kind reader sent me a note:I wonder if du Maurier knew Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean...
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The Phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement
We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Caillois ca. 1975. Photo: R. MinnaertIn an unremarkable section of Paris,...
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Black Ink
Henry de Montherlant’s novels have fallen out of fashion, but at their best they’re perfect for our confused age.Henry de Montherlant, c. 1953.Henry de Montherlant began writing in earnest after he...
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Kicked Toward Saintliness
On the dark erotics of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.From a German edition of Our Lady of the Flowers.On September 11, 1895, the deputy chaplain of Wandsworth prison wrote a worried report about...
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Branded Man
The long tradition of outlaw poets.From the cover of Merle Haggard’s Branded Man, 1967.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Austin Reed’s The Life and the...
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I Call This Oulipo Meeting to Order, and Other News
In July 2009, the French mathematician Michèle Audin began to attend the monthly meetings of Oulipo, everyone’s favorite experimental collective. And they involved just as much wine, whining, and rare...
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The Necklace
Revisited is a new series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. For the first edition, Sloane Crosley revisits Guy de Maupassant’s story “The...
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The Unique Sound of the Cricket
Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876.Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was...
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Paris from Camus’s Notebooks
Albert Camus.The myth is tenacious: an unknown writer on the verge of international fame, not suspecting that the scattered pages on his or her desk will become that miracle, a first published novel...
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