France
Story Stream
The Logistics of Terror November 19, 2024
Every Monday between September 2021 and June 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère would file 1,500 words for the Paris-based magazine L’Obs (now Le Nouvel Obs). He was part of the magazine’s three-member team covering the trial of 20 men accused ...
Was Houellebecq Right? November 13, 2024
The date for the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel was 7 January 2015. The book’s title was Soumission (Submission), and rarely had pre-publication reviews for a book been so vitriolic. The French literary scene loathed the novel, which...
The Sun Also Sets November 13, 2024
The Library of America is something of a publishing curiosity. Its declared aim is to preserve America’s literary heritage “by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” Yet, unlike those...
On Loving America November 11, 2024
The famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs most happily translates as: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I first read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain i...
The Death of the Liberal Media November 11, 2024
There was a moment in August when the center-left establishment media was hotter than it ever was. This was around the time Tim Walz was allowed to call Republicans “weird.” Mainstream media led the liberal Internet by the tail into Kamala Country. S...
Houellebecq’s Last Warning November 01, 2024
It has become a bit of a cliché to point out that Michel Houellebecq is something of a prophet. The 68-year-old French writer’s debut novel Whatever (1994) gave us Raphael Tisserand – a 28-year-old virgin who considers murdering a couple on a beach o...
Thal Tales November 01, 2024
RIOTS IN PARIS GRAB THE HEADLINES, but the real radicalism in France happens in the countryside. Take the zone à défendre, or ZAD, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. What began in 2012 as a farmer’s protest against the construction of an airport turned into a...
The Poet October 09, 2024
I've had my galley of Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation for at least four months now; I've been able to stare at the tentative publication date of 10-8-24, thinking about when I'm going to get around to writing this review.There's something in Houell...
Clan of the Cave Bore October 09, 2024
Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of ...
France’s Most Controversial Novelist October 09, 2024
Michel Houellebecq — arguably the most important French writer of the past quarter-century — was perched on the seat of his chair like a bird. We were sitting in his dim Paris apartment in August, a spectacularly beautiful day visible through his cur...
Author & Aviator October 08, 2024
In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People...
On 'Creation Lake' September 16, 2024
The thematic and historical reach of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel is ambitiously broad, taking in the lives and art of Neanderthals, the mysterious medieval culture of the persecuted Cagot minority in France, and the political sundering of that coun...
Lunch With Michel Houellebecq September 16, 2024
I meet Michel Houellebecq at Maison Péret, a busy brasserie serving regional French cuisine in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. He’s bang on time for lunch — which is to say he arrives at 6pm. “I can’t have a meal without drinking wine,” he had explained...
Houellebecq: Brexit, Sex Tapes and My Tears for France September 16, 2024
So here is Michel Houellebecq. The author of eight novels, several volumes of poetry and innumerable controversies stumbles out of the first day of autumn rain in Paris towards this down-at-heel brasserie. He looks rather dazed....
America’s Unlikely Tennis Star September 10, 2024
It was nearly midnight in New York City when Grigor Dimitrov’s hamstring came unglued. The commentator spoke gravely: “He’s going to dance at his own funeral. Heartbreaking, heartsick. It’s all that.”...
Pavel Durov’s Arrest Leaves Questions September 10, 2024
Last month, Pavel Durov’s arrest at Le Bourget airport in Paris ignited a flurry of speculation about the judicial and political dynamics underlying the apprehension. Was the American national security apparatus reigning in a wayward asset? Was Macro...
American Men’s Tennis Is Partying Like It’s 2009 September 06, 2024
What were you doing in the summer of 2009? Appraising Bradley Cooper’s comedic chops in The Hangover? Wondering if Obama could really get it together to pass a health-care bill? Collecting unemployment thanks to that pesky global recession? Look, the...
On Rachel Kushner's 'Creation Lake' September 05, 2024
Rachel Kushner ’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, shuttles between the story of Sadie Smith, a spy-for-hire tasked with observing Le Moulin, a radical environmentalist commune in rural southwest France, and the intercepted emails of Bruno Lacombe, a ca...
Chasing James Baldwin’s Shadow in the South of France August 06, 2024
Since James Baldwin’s death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion’s final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life....
Sha’Carri Richardson Did Not Fail August 06, 2024
On Saturday, at the Stade de France in Paris, the stage was all set for one of those classic Olympics redemption stories. After missing the Tokyo Games entirely due to a positive drug test and a controversial suspension, the American sprinter Sha’car...
The End of the Olympics? July 09, 2024
Everyone seems to like the Olympics. Every two years, people rally behind their country’s athletes and root for them even in the most unusual sports we usually don’t pay much attention to. This year, though, it seems like everyone likes the Olympics ...
The Euros Are Like Europe, Only Better July 03, 2024
There are two ways of confronting the tensions that have seized hold of Europe in recent days and weeks. Two ways, that is, of trying to understand the fears (genuine or misplaced), and the promises (vacant or smilingly hopeful), that fill the air. M...
Why Liberals Lose July 03, 2024
Since 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron has been the de facto leader of the Western liberal democracies. By comparison, Trump is too nationalist, Biden too old, British politics have been too turbulent, Trudeau is too vapid, and Scholz too pliab...
Europe is Healthier than US July 01, 2024
The above picture, from a cafe where I rested after a sixteen-mile walk, isn’t anything special. Neither is the town it’s in, Tournon-sur-Rhône, which is my least favorite of the string of mid-sized and smaller towns I stayed in along the Rhône Valle...
Françoise Hardy’s English Connections June 14, 2024
Françoise Hardy, who has died at the age of 80, was one of postwar France’s most celebrated singer-songwriters. Not only was she a peerless musician, whose career stretched from the early 1960s until 2018, but she acted, saw herself celebrated on bot...
