The First French Weird field trip. Rituals and lurking in cemeteries.

This week, Mary Beard gives us the inside track on what it's like to be a Booker Prize judge; and Russell Williams guides us through the highlights of a new season in French publishing.

Anne F. Garréta is best known for Sphinx (1986), her compelling, readable yet radical and experimental debut novel. That book, a love story with a

Emission dans Livres · Forget the accordion music, the cafés and the immaculate boulevards. There is a dark, uncanny and deeply strange texture pervading modern France—and it’s time to investigate.Wel...

It's been a fair while

It's been a fair while

For a long time, Dionys Mascolo (1916–97) was known mainly as a secondary figure in relation to the more famous writers and intellectuals around him. He

Travelling through the Berry region of central France, a driver comes across a huge motorway sign – one of those brown panels that mostly advertise

Towards the end of Louis Aragon’s novel Aurélien (1944), the muse and anti-muse Bérénice remarks of her lover Paul Denis, “So you see, he has left me

This week, Russell Williams on the French writers laying down their pens; and John-Paul Stonard hails a bravura production of Bertolt Brecht.

This week, Russell Williams on the French writers laying down their pens; and John-Paul Stonard hails a bravura production of Bertolt Brecht.

I first met Olivier Nora over fifteen years ago. He was a class act. As a young unknown writer, I was grateful that my manuscript had found its way to the desk of one of the most respected and most po...

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez is “very determined” to stop the June show in Marseille.

The first reviews of Simone De Beauvoir’s novel Les Belles images (1966) were dismissive. Some critics disliked its focus on the Parisian bourgeoisie and

Photographs of the French poet’s mistress, who posed for Edouard Manet, have been found in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris

Last April, a surprising photograph (see near right) appeared on the Wikipedia page devoted to Jeanne Duval, the long-term mistress of Charles Baudelaire and the “Black Venus” who inspired some of the...