Maitresse

Why Paris: a manifesto (part II of III)

(continued from Part One; still responding to the Wall St Journal article "Why the Expats Left Paris")

Part Three: Beyond an "American" in Paris

Is anyone else as tired of the word "expat" as I am? The word has become self-aggrandizing or vaguely insulting, and no longer serves its semantic purpose (that of distinguishing one who lives outside his native country). Instead, it seems to me to have become a euphemism for "pretentious loser."

Still, for want of a better word, it seems we're stuck with it. But the phrase we can try to do away with in anything other than a historical sense is that that clunky old "American in Paris."  Are there any Americans in town who do not grimace sardonically when someone says to them, "ah oui, encore un américain à Paris?" It's like you're being accused of having no will or imagination of your own—as if all you can do is aspire to live someone else's life. All the Americans in Paris I know are at the ready to refute the myth, to insist they came to Paris for various reasons (French love interest, studies, job, random geographical decision) but none would agree they came to perpetuate the myth of the expatriates of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Come to think of it, when I imagine the period between the wars, when Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein & Co were kicking around Montparnasse, the names that come to mind are not exclusively American. James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, HD, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Nathalie Barney, Robert MacAlmon, Katharine Mansfield, Una Troubridge—Anglophones, all; but of varied origin. Today the expat Anglophone scene is even more varied. I count among the expat writers of my acquaintance Canadians, Brits, Scots, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans—not to mention Germans, Italians, Venezualans, Japanese, Dutch, etc, etc.

We clearly need to move past the "American in Paris" myth, to recognize that Paris is a global capital with a thriving arts scene, that "expats" may be in town for a year or for life, that the "American in Paris" is a phenomenon of the past, and to look for this species today is to prove oneself at once sentimental and out of date.

Part Four: Ok, where is this flourishing creative scene?

"What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life," writes Mengestu. But it hasn't disappeared—it's just that the café has gone virtual. If the scene has changed, that does not mean it no longer exists-- the American cultural scene in Paris has adopted the Internet as its cafe of choice. A new Paris blog started every day, or so it seems. Every time a cork pops, an expat signs up at Wordpress. (For a selection of the best of them, take a look at my sidebar, or visit The Paris Blog).

As Fred Wilson remarks on his blog, "the Internet is slowly taking the place of the cafe as the congregation point." In Paris, where newly emigrated authors (like Mengestu) can often feel unmoored, the internet offers a tangible way to hook in to the community.  To the extent that cafes did function as places to meet, discuss, and write, the internet has to a great extent become a space where those activities can thrive. But that doesn't mean cafe culture has waned. Just that, for a number of different reasons, the expatriate creative community no longer hangs out in the three or four cafes in St Germain Mengestu cites.  It's moved elsewhere: on any given night, you can find a sampling of the local hipster flora and fauna at La Perle or Café Chéri(e); many writers still frequent Le Sélect in Montparnasse; the publishing crowd goes to Le Rostand and Les Editeurs.

Word  of events, publications, and so forth, is spread largely through the internet. One of the local superconnecters is the poet Jennifer K. Dick, who regularly posts a thorough list of literary events, calls for submissions, and writing contests. Dick also co-chairs the IVY Paris Writers group, along with fellow poet Michelle Noteboom. Drop by one of their events, and you're likely to find yourself in the company of Marilyn Hacker or Alice Notley. 

Says Dick, "there are a TON of things happening here, and among the authors floating around our fair city, we have CK Williams, Jorie Graham, Ellen Hinsey, Denis Hirson, Jeffrey Greene, Jake Lamar, etc.  Younger poets or poets with first books out such as Michelle Noteboom, myself, Lisa Pasold, and Margo Berdeshevsky," who has 2 books coming out in 2009. Then there's Nicholas Manning and Jonathan Regier, she adds, not to mention the "half-timers," Cole Swensen, Marilyn Hacker, Mary Baine Cambell, Thalia Field, etc.

Dick and Noteboom recently published a thorough summer reading list on the site that functions as a virtual guidebook to the local talent.

Other adopted Parisians include Diane Johnson, Anne Marsella, Mavis Gallant, Nancy Huston, Thirza Valois, and others I'm probably forgetting.

Two major US literary journals specifically employ "Paris editors": Susannah Hunnewell for the Paris Review, and Heather Hartley for Tin House.

There are also regular events at bookshops like the Village Voice and Shakespeare & Co; at a Siri Hustvedt reading a few months ago, I found myself face to face with the Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, who has lived in Paris for several decades, and regularly see the poet and translator Claire Malroux and Emmanuel Moses in attendance. (And those are just the faces I recognize.) At Shakespeare and Co, the readings are often followed with a wine reception where attendees mill around the bookstore, meeting or hiding from each other. Their recent literary festival was a milestone, both for the bookshop and for the Parisian literary scene. Sylvia Whitman is reenergizing the place in a major way, making it not only a monument to the past, but relevant to the current literary conversation.

There are also regular readings at the Red Wheelbarrow, Shakespeare & Co, the American Library in Paris, and WH Smith; when Catherine Sanderson read from her new book, Petite Anglaise, in April, a throng of her fellow bloggers showed up at WH Smith to support her, and flooded a nearby Japanese restaurant for dinner afterward.

As for the literary magazines— there are not as many as there were, it's true, but there is certainly no dearth. Some projects which were still operating as of a few years ago seem to have waned (Lieuscape, Frank, Van Gogh's Ear), but some are still going (more or less) strong: Upstairs at Duroc, part of WICE Paris, which is a great resource for writers in the city; 3:AM (also based in the UK), Paris/Atlantic, Double Change, La Traductière, Kimometer Zero. The new kid on the block is Hitotoki, which I am proud to edit in Paris (we launch next week!).  And let's not forget the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, which publishes a series of Cahiers. 

And I haven't even gotten started on the journalists—there are the food writers (Patricia Wells, Dorie Greenspan, David Leibowitz, and the new guard-- Clotilde Dusoulier, Adrian Moore, Meg Zimbeck, Phyllis Flick, and Amy Glaze Wittman), or the fashion writers (Elisabeth Fourmont, Rory Satran, Sarina Lewis, and Rebecca Magniant), not to mention the reporters and photographers and-- well, you get the picture. There are writers. In Paris. Living by their writing. Doing what they love and sharing it with as many people as they can reach. Trying to get through to something new.

To claim that there is nothing going on in Paris, creatively speaking, is ridiculous, not to mention insulting to all of those writers and artists who have made Paris their home, and who go withstand a lot of financial and bureaucratic difficulties to stay.

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I'm sure I've left many, many people out of this post-- my apologies.  I'm drawing from my own limited experience, and I welcome additions and corrections in the comments section.

A few more literary/cultural resources:
The Spoken Word performance group, which has launched its own literary magazine, Platform
The Live Poets Society
GoGo Paris
Bonjour Paris
Paris Voice
IVY Paris News
the late, lamented Gridskipper
Heather Stimmler-Hall's Secrets of Paris

Coming next: Part Five: Shakespeare & Co: a "myth in three dimensions," and Conclusion: Why Paris

On camera: Nancy Huston

Nancy Huston talks about her novel Fault Lines, her attempt to show that childhood is not a "lost paradise, " and the Prix Femina versus the Orange Prize.

Previously unpublished letters between Vita Sackville-West and a young writer called Margaret Howard, written in 1941, which discuss Virginia Woolf just after her death, are being auctioned off at Southeby's, reports The Guardian.

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A full set of chapters of the Tale of Genji dating to the mid-fourteenth century have been discovered in a private residence in Tokyo. [Via TEV]

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And from the très ancien to the avant-garde: in the Guardian's Books Blog, Lee Rouke wonders, what ever happened to British avant garde fiction? "It seems to have found a home in London's conceptual art world," he writes.

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A new project at Library Thing lets you look at the libraries of famous writers: I See Dead People's Books. Right now you can peek into the libraries of Marie Antoinette, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath, among others, and there are many other in progress. Via Three Percent. Also via 3%: Zoomii Books, a virtual bookshop. It's a neat idea, but the titles are a little hard to read, at least on my computer screen.

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The incomparable Nicolas Weill takes another look at Jean-Paul Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive (1946) for Le Monde. [FR] If you're interested by what you read there, you might do well to look at Weill's book La République et les antisémites. 

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The New Yorker only just now gets around to realizing there was a controversy around the "Paris sous l'Occupation" exhibit at the Hotel de Ville this spring. (I told you about it in April.) Via Ed.

Call for illustrators

Hitotoki Paris is almost ready to launch! We still need about 4 illustrations to go with the stories we're using for the launch, so I'm turning to all you artist types out there to see if you'd like to contribute. Ideally we'd like to have them by next week!

Contact me at lauren at hitotoki dot org and I'll give you specific information on the content of the stories-- the sites include Odéon, an Ed supermarket, a church, and the metro.

Thanks!

Taking a break from manifesto-making to share a piece I wrote for the Guardian: "Writers, beware the drive-by when you blog."

Also: I'm reading my first Murakami this weekend, After Dark, and I see now what the big deal is-- it's so atmospheric, so well-observed, and so mysterious. Highly recommended.

Why Paris: a new manifesto for an old subject (I of III)

Part One: Moratorium

I am mildly embarrassed to have let my feathers ruffle so because of a puff piece in the Wall Street Journal called "Why the Expats Left Paris." For me, it was one puff piece too many, because the more these articles are published, the more a certain idea about Paris is reinforced, and the American reading public deserves better stories of that city than what they've been getting. I am not naive enough to think that because one writer voices her discontent, the quality of articles about Paris will improve; still, I must speak up.

I hereby call for a end to clichéd articles about literary Paris, all those which invoke the names of the deities ("Sartre" and "Beauvoir") in an incantation to raise from the dead the spirit of a Paris that never existed.

Newspaper editors must think these stories are romantic in some way, but the subject has been utterly emptied of its original meaning, and now signals only "here is another article about that place everyone likes with the tower and the bridges." What is written is incidental to the fact that it is being said, again, and it is in this way that sloppy mistakes and misconceptions creep in. Besides which, aren't newspaper editors in the business of printing news? It seems to me that any other travel story on any other location would have been researched and fact-checked.  But because it's Paris, and we've heard this story before, touchy-feely clichés based on one person's very limited experience are apparently acceptable. This is called "reification."

Do not misunderstand me: this is not a moratorium for all invocations of literary Paris: only those which tell us nothing, add nothing, and flatten out an important moment in literary history. I call for this moratorium in favor of better, truer writing about Paris.  Let us agree no longer to reduce Paris to this tired cliché, and to produce, if not works to rival Being and Nothingness or The Ethics of Ambiguity, at least better travel writing.

What is the difference between a cliché and a myth? Myths are stories we tell ourselves, to explain why we form affinities with certain things, or to help cope with a necessary but unpleasant rite of passage. Myths can be productive; myths can be powerful. But they can also create a false sense of communal agreement—false because the terms are assumed, not specified. Myths can also be untrue.

Literary Paris is a potent myth. An entire cottage industry of books has cropped up around it, some of them quite good, some of them horrid. But how do we tell the difference? Not long ago, I reviewed a book called Paris Cafe: the Select Crowd.  This book treats the myth in a way that both pays homage to the past and makes it relevant to the present. The ineffable quality of the cafe comes through in the gossipy and insightful writing, and the visceral, well-wrought illustrations.

Clichés, on the other hand, are dead thoughts. The term cliché, in French, can also be used to mean "snapshot." As in "here, let me show you the banal pictures I took on my last trip to Paris." The article in question employed enough clichés to fill up a Flickr account.

In writing about Paris, clichés are easy to use and hard to avoid.  They must first be acknowledged, and then excised: a new way of speaking about an old subject must be sought, and failure to conquer the cliché will ensue your argument rests on a weak foundation. The writer or the artist with Paris as his subject must find his own vernacular. 

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This "manifesto," if you will, may seem out of proportion to this particular article. Surely it is a bit of light reading for the weekend's Wall Street Journal, destined for the trash bins on Monday. Nothing anyone should take seriously.

But the writer, Dinaw Mengestu, is the kind of guy you do take seriously. He has written a well-received first novel (The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, which won the 2007 Guardian First Book Award as well as the Prix du Meilleur Premier Roman Etranger that year, which is more than most of us can say), and he has also published engaging articles on Darfur and Uganda. Surely what Mengestu writes bears the stamp of thoughtfulness and commitment— is worthy of our scrutiny more than, say, some hack journalist trying to make a buck off of a pile of clichés. (I say this with all due respect for hack journalists, being one, on occasion, myself). It is all the more disappointing, then, that instead of delivering an insightful look at Paris, we are served an interesting idea wrapped in nonsense.

His premise is that black American writers once fled the racial (no mention of homophobic) discrimination of their native land for the "refuge and sanctuary" of Paris, whereas nowadays, America has caught up with France, and France has in fact become more conservative, judging at least from the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking basis for an article. But then he gets bogged down with wondering where the expat American literary community has gone, looking from left to right on the Blvd St Germain, finding only tourists in a café lamenting the price of a bottle of water (presumably they are too dense to know they could get a carafe of water for free). He concludes, like Robinson Crusoe, "I am alone on the island," and goes on to extol the joys of being in a Paris that is no better or worse than any American city. Moreover, he rejoices that there are no other American writers hanging around to cramp his style or force him to feel "fashionable."

The Wall Street Journal's weekend paper was perhaps not the market for a 9,000 word think piece on the comparative environments for African-Americans in the US and African immigrants in France, which I am sure Mengestu could write ably, given more time in France. But to make the article marketable—for the editors, the readers, and the advertisers—it needed a catchier hook. And this is how Paris becomes a cliché: when it is reduced to a marketing concept. The result: "Why the Expats Left Paris."

Sorry to disappoint you, Dinaw, but we haven't left. You're just not looking for us in the right places.

Part Two: Now versus then

Mengestu has been living in the 6th, he tells us, where he finds the lure of nostalgia too strong to resist; he fantasizes sitting in the Café du Flore with Sartre and Beauvoir, overhearing an argument between Wright and Baldwin. Fair enough; we all have these moments (they do tend to happen more in the beginning of one's time in Paris, and fade after the first year or so).

His version of the "good old days" is as vague and unspecific as the bad new days. It amounts to a misreading both of our era and of theirs.  Paris then is presented as a grand old place to live, with Sartre and Beauvoir placidly presiding over the intellectual scene. Nevermind that Beauvoir and Sartre sat and wrote for hours in the Flore, or was it the Magots, because they couldn't afford to heat their apartments. Mengestu's version includes no mention of the vicious infighting amongst the literati, the casual racism and anti-Semitism, even after the Holocaust. Richard Wright moved to Paris in 1946, Baldwin in 1948. Where is the post-war épuration in Mengestu's account? Where is the Sétif massacre? The rumblings of war in Algeria? No, in the mythic version of the postwar days, Paris was just a happy land of philosophers. But to romanticize this era within the context of an article that ventures into the political waters of our day (at least by the invocation of "Seine-Saint-Denis" and the 2005 riots, which have acquired a mythic stature of their own), is in bad taste.

There was indeed a culture of relaxed mores which flourished in Paris between the wars, as well as in the 50s and 60s, which attracted writers and artists from around the world; and yes, Wright and Baldwin did enjoy more freedom from prejudice in France than they did in the States. This is not in dispute. But building a mythology around those eras because of those freedoms is kind of a flat, un-nuanced reading of history. What were Baldwin and Wright arguing about? This article gives us myth without matière.

Blinded by his nostalgia for Paris in the 50s, Mengestu has a hard time seeing contemporary Paris. "What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life." Missing from where? From the Blvd St Germain? Or from Paris altogether? The first might be accurate; the second would be deluded.  Does he hang out with no one under the age of 40? Francophone or Anglophone, they would have informed him that the creative types are hanging out predominantly in northeast Paris. He need only look away from the 6th to find communities of writers and artists making a living as best they can, and living in Paris for one reason or another—some, like James Baldwin, just to get away from where they're from, some because they are inspired by and in sync with the city. Look to the 13th, to the Butte aux Cailles, where American blogger Aimee Gille has recently opened her own cafe. Look to the outskirts of Pere Lachaise. Look to Belleville. These are places that have their own mythologies as well now (which I've complained of in the past, but it seems amazing to me that Mengestu would not mention them). If Baldwin and Wright were to sit down over coffee today, they would do it at Café Chéri(e), and it would cost €2,20, or $3.50 a cup-- roughly what they'd pay in a cafe in Brooklyn

"Today it's impossible for me to imagine the sense of refuge and sanctuary that other Americans once found here," Mengestu writes. But even if the atmosphere "back home" these days is kinder to racial and sexual minorities than it was in Wright's day, Paris is still a refuge and a sanctuary for the expatriate, by virtue of its being far from home, a different culture, a place to reinvent oneself in a completely foreign context. If Mengestu had bothered to talk to any expatriates other than himself, he might have found this out.

Still to come: Part Three: Beyond an "American" in Paris, and Part Four: So who are these creative types and where can I find them?

around the internet on a tuesday

Here's today's batch of links, featuring Henry James, Serbs, Guy Davenport, Lampedusa, Vorticism and Néojaponisme...

I want to read this novel, excerpted in Guernica. It's called How the Soldier repairs the gramaphone, and although the writing seems a bit precious in places, in others it seems very powerful. I must get my hands on a copy. An excerpt from the excerpt:

The Drina, what a neglected river, what forgotten beauty, he would lament when he came staggering out of a bar, once with the frame of his glasses bent, another time after wetting himself, oh, the stink of it! What a messy business old age is, he wept when he stumbled and fell, trying to hold tight to the river in case he took off. Oh, how often we found him at night under the first arch of the bridge, lying on his belly with his fingers clutching the surface of the water. Swollen, blue hands, half-clenched into fists. He’d be holding flowers in the river, stones, sometimes a cognac bottle. It went on like that for years. Ever since they took the railway out of service, so that there were no more trains running through the town with that sad man switching the points for them, setting the signals, raising the barriers. He lost his job and never said a word about it, he had nothing to do now and nothing at all to say. He was sent into retirement and he drank day after day, first in secret up at the railway station that wasn’t a station anymore, though the old engine still stood there, and later by the river and in the middle of town, overcome by sudden, stupid love for the water and its banks.

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Wyatt Mason has been writing a really good blog over at Harper's. Check out his most recent tribute to Guy Davenport-- good stuff.

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Hermione Lee reviews a new biography of the James family by Paul Fisher in the NYT.

The story has often been told, either as a family narrative or in individual biographies. What does Paul Fisher, a professor of English at Wellesley, bring to this crowded territory? His argument is that no single member of the family, however remarkable his or her achievement, can be understood separately from the others, and that there has as yet been no view of the family that takes into account late-20th-century work on same-sex love, gender, repression, illness, depression and alcoholism. In Fisher’s view, it has never been made apparent how “contemporary” the Jameses are, how relevant to our times as “the forerunners of today’s Prozac-loving, depressed or bipolar, self-conscious, narcissistic, fame-seeking, self-dramatized, hard-to-mate-or-marry Americans.”

Might be a bit of a stretch. Either way, this multiple-biography trend, in which famous figures are analyzed in concert with their less famous companions or family members,  shows no signs of abating.

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The New York Times also takes us on a tour of Sicily with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard (1958). After reading this article (and the Bookforum review of a few months back) I finally caved and ordered the book. If not now, when?

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Here is a very fine essay on Occidentalism from Néojaponisme: "Performances of East-West Discourses in Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows." Sounds academic, I know, but it's worth reading.

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The new Wyndham Lewis exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London has the Times calling the fascist founder of Vorticism "the finest British portraitist of the 20th century."

The portrait drawings are superb; all that excellent vorticist training had turned Lewis into an expert at finding the exact dynamic line with which to capture an outline or exaggerate a feature. Virginia Woolf anxiously kneads a pair of clumsy, outsized, workman’s hands that belong on Lady Chatterley’s gardener. Nancy Cunard, one of Lewis’s many flings, has her thinness compared with the thin bell-tower of a church in Venice. “Autumn pederasts everywhere, with a sprinkling of fascisti,” complained Lewis of his Venetian love-holiday with Cunard.

Why Paris?

James Baldwin noted shortly after he first arrived in France, "I didn't go to Paris. I left New York." Inherent in that statement is the idea that it wasn't the destination but the departure that mattered most. I can't help but think that to some degree that sentiment still holds true, although for drastically different reasons than before. Paris has lost some of what once made it so special and unique, enough so that it's hard to imagine another outburst of American cultural creativity taking place in Paris again anytime soon. Why Paris when there's the rest of the world, much of which is cheaper and more unknown? It's a question I hear constantly, less so from Americans than Parisians who seem baffled by my decision to be here.

I am still seething over Dinaw Mengestu's article in the Wall Street Journal, "Why the Expats Left Paris," but I've narrowed it down to this particular paragraph, which rings polemical to me (but maybe I'm just overly sensitive on this subject). I'm still working on articulating my response (right now I just have a growing Word document filled with indignant sputtering), and I'll post it as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I invite all the expats who are reading this to leave comments or email me privately, answering Mengetsu's question, "Why Paris?"

Why did you come to Paris, and not anywhere else in the world?  What is it that makes Paris special and unique?

Mengetsu concludes his article by professing his affection for the quietness of Paris, extolling the absence of an expatriate scene which would presumably deafen his thoughts. "There's no romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or events that can't be missed." I can't speak to the romantic ideal part-- that's up to the individual.  But as for the readings and events-- how very, very wrong he is.

 

This article from the Wall Street Journal has me so angry I can't even articulate a coherent rebuttal right this moment-- so many clichés and misconceptions, so little actual research! But I'll get you one shortly.

lessons learned in korea:

1) Seoul looks just like Queens (though probably it is the other way 'round). Except for.
2) As little as I care for Tokyo, it is a much nicer city than Seoul.
3) Metal chopsticks are really hard to use.
4) The thing that makes Bib Bim Bap really good is some kind of sesame oil, without which it's just a bowl of rice and veggies in a stone pot.
5) South Korean airport security is so tight it rivals Israel's.
6) Sebastian Faulks is kind of a mediocre writer, at least judging from The Girl at the Lion d'Or.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

liberation

Best news I've heard in weeks. (Here it is in English)

And now I'm off to Korea for the weekend! See you next week.

hands off!

This is insane. (via Maud)

around the internet on a tuesday

The Oulipo poets create literature out of certain constraints, such as leaving out a certain letter, or writing in anagrams or palindromes. Spam operates under a similar circumstances, but with a non-literary goal-- computer programs write algorithms to try to sneak past your spam filter. The result is often just as brilliant, and now poets are incorporating the jewels of their email's catchers into their work. Andrew Gallix takes us further into the world of "Spoetry." While you're at it, check out this blog.

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We're working hard on getting the Hitotoki Paris site to launch-- any day now!-- so while you're waiting, go ahead and check out the recently launched Hitotoki Shanghai, edited by the lovely Panthea Lee. Lots of goodies over there!

By the by-- we will be adding new stories on a weekly or biweekly basis, so don't be shy-- please contribute!

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Who's your favorite geographer? Mine's David Harvey. Watch a series of video lectures with him here-- the subject is Marx's Capital. (Via Ready Steady Book, once again via this lovely chap Rowan!) He has a wonderful book on Paris, as well (which I reviewed a million years ago for Reconstruction). 

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After warping the scansion of Emily Dickinson and WB Yeats on her last album, word has it that on her new album, on sale July 21, Carla Bruni has set a poem by Michel Houellebecq to music. Raphael Sorin has the full story, some guesses as to which poem, and some nice thoughts on Houellebecq's language. (FR)

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The Valve is running a summer reading project: everyone's reading Adam Bede together, and Rowan Maitzen is leading the discussion. My copy is in NY, sad face!

La rentrée littéraire en chiffres

Only 676 new novels will be published at la rentrée this year, AFP reports (via TV5)-- a 7.1% decrease over 2007. 

The market is so saturated every year that objectively speaking, it doesn't seem too much of a shame.  But when you consider the breakdown, you begin to see where the cutbacks were made-- in translations (10% fewer than last year) and first novels (91 this year; 102 last year).

But then, what young writer in her right mind would want her debut effort to appear in the fall, along with 675 other novels vying for readers' attention? Better the untried get a better shot at the market by releasing their earnest little oeuvres when they'll get more play at the FNAC.

So what can we look forward to? New work from Catherine Millet, Christine Angot, Régine Desforges, Olivier Rolin, Jean-Paul Dubois, Yann Quéffelec, Laurent Gaudé, Amélie Nothomb, Colombe Schneck... and a book-length essay by Pierre Assouline called Le blog ou la vie. Bref, il y en aura de quoi lire!

Colette does New York

The hipper-than-thou Paris fashion emporium is taking a vacation to New York this fall, reports WWD*-- brought to you by none other than the Gap!

The San Francisco-based retailer has commissioned the renowned Paris boutique to create a one-month installation in its rotating Gap concept store adjacent to its Fifth Avenue flagship at 54th Street. Dubbed "Colette x Gap," the shop, Colette's first store in the U.S., will be open from September 6 through October 5.
(...)
Exclusive products that will be available at the temporary shop will include Colette's signature candles, room fragrance, musk oil, CDs and artist edition products. Limited edition Colette collaborations include partnerships with Oakley sunglasses, Starter jackets, Uslu Airlines nail polish, Le Labo fragrance Vanilla 44, Domestic vinyl stickers, Hello Kitty watch and Asics Tiger sneakers. Gap will also issue limited edition tees with prints by both Paris and New York-based artists.

It's as if the coolest, most fashion-forward girl in your high school class were taking the very boring (but very nice) preppy guy to the prom: New Yorkers will have access to all that originality. Colette gets a space in midtown. The Gap looks cool by association. Everyone wins.

The only downside I foresee is that this will probably attract the kind of crowds last seen mobbing Topshop to buy a little piece of Kate Moss's sartorial whimsy-- which will involve standing in line for hours, trying on clothes on the spot, and getting into a catfights over a t-shirt. Something tells me the average New Yorker  will throw up her hands in exasperation and leave without buying anything. (But I look forward to being proved wrong when I swing through town in early September.)

*Thanks to my dear friend Wendy for the link!