-
Lost Foundations - Thomas Pynchon
Built on the bizarre notion that change arrives gradually enough to be managed through insurance policies, security equipment, healthy eating, and regular exercise. And that disaster never comes roaring from the sky...
-
Submission - Michel Houellebecq
The truth was unavoidable: rotting from within at a repulsive rate, Western Europe could no longer save itself. No more than ancient Rome could in the 5th century. The massive arrival...
-
A Little Literary Game
Following the lead of other bloggers, I'm playing the "title game" – answering life's existential questions using only book titles read in 2022. Describe yourself: An Absolute Disaster. How...
-
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - Pierre Bayard
Our relationship with books isn't the continuous, homogeneous process that some critics suggest. Nor is it a space of transparent self-knowledge. It's a dark territory haunted by memory fragments, and its value...
-
March in Paris
March was frustrating, perfectly true to itself: alternating clear skies and freezing showers. And I'm not just talking about the weather. Saying goodbye without regrets, hoping April has a steadier temperament...
-
Poetry Spring 2025 /3
Today, another essential 20th-century poet: René Char. Evadné. Summer and our lives were one. The countryside ate the color of your fragrant skirt. Greed and constraint had reconciled. The castle of Maubec was sinking...
-
April in Paris (2)
April in Paris felt like summer. Short skirts and sandals. I walked through parks constantly, picnicked in parks, read in parks. And occasionally shut myself in a dark cinema...
-
Monsieur Hiblot - Éric Reinhardt [Audio]
The hope of somewhere else to reach and a fullness where one can breathe. I'm still not a huge audiobook fan, probably because I'm more visual than auditory, and need the text in front of me to really appreciate it...
-
The Sweet Dove Died - Barbara Pym
"I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving; O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a single thread of my own hand's weaving..." John Keats. Leonora, an attractive woman in her forties...
-
Everything Sleeps Peacefully Except Love - Claude Pujade-Renaud
"I was equipped with an almost reckless faith in my capacity to do all things except one: become a free bird, even for a single day..." Kierkegaard. He adored horses, birds, and Mozart, but wasn't a poet. He studied philosophy...
-
Back to England!
Do what you want in May, head to England in June. In June the literary blogosphere goes British, participating in English Month organized by fellow bloggers. The principle is simple: read English authors, watch...
-
May 2025: Month After Month
A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it isn't open. (Frank Zappa) Quai de la Loire - Paris 19. Lily of the valley and lumbago / (False) vacations / Two more weeks to finish my homework / Hyperconcentrated and chained to my computer / Literature...
-
The Book of Queens - Joumana Haddad
"In her veins flowed the thick blood of insubordination, along with an addictive liquor called pain." Like a deck of cards, this novel has four queens. Four women from four generations of the same family. They're called Qayah...
-
Betty - Tiffany McDaniel
"Becoming a woman means facing the knife. Learning to bear the blade's edge and the wounds. Learning to bleed. And despite the scars, managing to stay beautiful and having knees strong enough to push the mop...
-
Ohio - Stephen Markley
"At some point, they'd have to unhook these ghosts from the trees where they hung. You couldn't leave them swinging indefinitely." They were 17 or 18 in 2000 in the small town of New Canaan, Ohio, and watched live...
-
Yoga - Emmanuel Carrère
"Without bragging, I'm exceptionally gifted at turning a life that should be happy into genuine hell, and I won't let anyone speak lightly of that hell: it's real, terribly real." I'd never read Emmanuel...
-
The Flap - Philippe Lançon
"Writing was the product of another me, a product precisely meant to extract me from the state I was in, even though it consisted of describing that state." I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book that everyone...
-
Grace - Paul Lynch
"We're convinced we decide our lives, but in truth we're blind vagabonds advancing step by step, constantly rediscovering our own blindness." The day her mother furiously cuts off her magnificent red hair, Grace...
-
Lost Children Archive - Valeria Luiselli
"All I see in retrospect is the chaos of history repeating infinitely, replaying itself, reinterpreting, the world, its degenerate heart pulsing beneath us, failing, screwing up again and again, while continuing its orbit around...
-
The Great Vertigo - Pierre Ducrozet
"Hyper-capitalism is a war, with multiple fronts, battles, and dead bodies, a quiet march toward nothingness." Imagine. Imagine that in 2025 the international community actually understood the danger climate change posed to humanity...
-
Beloved - Toni Morrison
"Any white person had the right to seize your entire being for any reason. Not just to make you work, kill you, or mutilate you, but to dirty you. Dirty you so severely that it would be forever impossible to...
-
The Other Half of Herself - Brit Bennett
"When she entered the building she was black and when she left she was white. It was their gaze that transformed her." They were two light-skinned black twins, Desiree the bold and Stella the reserved, in a small Louisiana town...
-
Rough Animals - Rae DelBianco
"Men think they know everything about the desert just like they think they know everything about violence. But they're wrong, about both." With their ranch's finances barely holding, Wyatt and Lucy Smith, a pair of tightly bonded twins, can't...
-
The Cellars of the Potala - Dai Sijie
"Like all Tibetans, he didn't know the tragedy of death. It only marked the brief passage from one form of life to another, not a definitive disappearance into the abyss of an unfathomable mystery." 1968: China is in full cultural revolution...
-
English Summers - Elizabeth Jane Howard
"The air had a warm scent of rose and honeysuckle, blackbirds roosting for the night emitted their metallic clicks, and the sky, streaked with small vaporous clouds like down, was turning apricot." What better way to start the year cozily...