Paris
Story Stream
Malaise at the Monoprix November 26, 2024
Michel Houellebecq’s characters spend a lot of time in supermarkets. In the opening pages of The Elementary Particles, the depressed main character scarfs down a prepackaged fillet of monkfish, sold under the “gourmet” line of the French supermarket ...
Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists November 26, 2024
Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: Shakespearean profundity, Dickensian squalor, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Rabelaisian—satirical, excessive, corpulent—joins these ranks. The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, ...
The Perils of a Post-Racial Utopia November 22, 2024
Years ago, a friend of a friend who had just bought a home told me that the biggest difference between renting and owning was that cops now treated him with respect. He and I are both Black, so I immediately knew what he meant. In countless contexts,...
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 ...
What I Want to Say About Owning a Truck November 18, 2024
When I was seventeen, my father put me in charge of his black Nissan Hardbody pickup. Its driver’s-side brake light got smashed when I backed into a dumpster. I sealed it with red translucent lens-repair tape. (Can you say the word translucent if you...
Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy November 15, 2024
Back in 2006, I was doing an internship at the International Herald Tribune, in Paris. The work was mostly menial. I would photocopy mock-ups of pages for the next day’s edition and sometimes enter short descriptions of articles into an internal mana...
Masters of Horror and Magic November 07, 2024
Midway through the 1944 liberation of Paris, Ernest Hemingway told his newest fiancée: “Some of the patrols we made would scare you worse than Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Hemingway would know; like Auden and Faulkner, Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, he was...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
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...
Reborn in the City of Light October 29, 2024
In 1935, Berenice Abbott was photographing scenes for her monumental collection Changing New York when a male bureaucrat at the Federal Art Project admonished her. “Nice girls” didn’t venture into rough neighborhoods like New York City’s Skid Row, he...
On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It October 28, 2024
The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it....
‘To Overthrow the World’ Review: Communists in Control October 25, 2024
In 1797, as the revolution in France cooled down following the Reign of Terror, François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf stood trial for organizing a putsch against the governing directorate running Paris at the time. In an undaunted defense of his actions, B...
Peacock Needs More Hits October 21, 2024
When Peacock became the streaming hub for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, it didn’t quite go to plan, with users complaining about limited viewing options and a glitchy interface. It was, to quote NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, a “big di...
Do Dogs Know What Art Is? October 21, 2024
Do dogs know what art is?Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months old. We’ve lived together as a little family for over a decade. When Oscar was a puppy, I did a one-semester residency at Bar...
Baking Gingerbread Cake with Laurie Colwin October 18, 2024
In the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness, a mother and daughter get on the telephone to discuss the menu for an upcoming family dinner—either a roast leg of lamb or roast beef, with potatoes and, the mother says, “those lovely cold string beans of...
Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship October 16, 2024
I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xav...
We’ve Entered a New World War October 15, 2024
PARIS — Bernard-Henri Lévy has been so famous in France for so long he is known by his own acronym. BHL is a wealthy philosopher, celebrity war reporter, television executive and friend to presidents and movie stars. He is as quintessentially French ...
Has Houellebecq Found a Happy Ending? October 14, 2024
In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, Michel Houellebecq explained that he was not a “reactionary,” since he believes it is impossible to resist social change. “You can only observe and describe,” Houellebecq said. “I’ve always liked Balzac’s ve...
A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre October 10, 2024
Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo t...
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...
The Year of Snoop Dogg October 08, 2024
A couple of weeks ago, The Voice—you know, the prime-time reality singing competition, the showcase that gave us good ol’ Morgan Wallen—returned for its 26th season on NBC. I don’t follow the show, and I might not have otherwise cared to watch a seco...
Hannah Arendt, Poet October 01, 2024
For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgen...
Histoire de Serge Gainsbourg June 06, 2024
Half-smoked Gitanes stick out of the glass ashtray like limbs trying to escape quicksand. The bottle of Château Pétrus is drained. Three Snickers bars idle in a translucent refrigerator—the half-eaten one has tooth marks that resemble a 33-year-old p...
Building Palm Beach June 06, 2024
If Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it one of marble, Henry Morrison Flagler and Paris Singer found Palm Beach an island of jungle and left it one of stucco. Every great place has an origin story: Rome had the twins and the wolf; New York...
The Many Lives of Arielle Dombasle June 03, 2024
Arielle Dombasle seems capable of almost anything. She is a singer, actress, director, model, and burlesque dancer widely considered a gay icon and a creative muse. She has inspired the work of legendary film directors like Eric Rohmer and Alain Robb...
