books
blog
The Stirrings of My Felt Body
To read Proust is to feel the fluctuations of a consciousness in all its mingled modes—sensory, cognitive, emotional. But for me the enchantment of his immense novel lies in the fact that the narrator is agonizingly aware of the chasm between experience and language.
blog
This Everest of Literature
I confess: For more than forty years, I’ve had this Everest of literature on my shelves, but all previous attempts to conquer its summit had defeated me.
news
In Residence: At the Villa Gillet
It’s been like this for the last four days, said the cabbie at the station the rainy Saturday I reached Lyon from Los Angeles. No, it’s been like this since the start of spring, said Isabelle and Valentin of the Villa Gillet, who met me with an umbrella at the gates of Les Subsistances. Behind and below us swelled the brown river Saône, overflowing the lower quays.
events
On July 1, Manhattan's Film Forum will present a special screening of Camille, the 1936 MGM film starring Greta Garbo.
Screening of Garbo version of CAMILLE, followed by book signing
July 1| 7pm
Film Forum
news
26th Annual Translation Prize
On June 5, the French-American Foundation announced the winners of their 26th Annual Translation Prize for superior English translations of French works published in 2012. Alyson Waters and Nora Scott were recognized at the Annual Awards Ceremony and each received a prize, funded by the Florence Gould Foundation.
news
Picture This! Draws Crowds
The young and young-at-heart alike gathered for a series of cross-cultural conversations about illustration and inspiration, method and madness during the Picture This! series on visual narrative. Illustrators of children’s and comic books took the voyage from Paris to New York to launch new books to the US market, run workshops, participate in festivals, and meet their local counterparts for a series of lively discussions.
news
Residencies in Review: Collège International des Traducteurs Littéraires
The Centre International des Traducteurs Littéraires (CITL) in Arles is located in a former hospital where Vincent Van Gogh was once a patient. About one half of the building is dedicated to a space for translators, while the other half, called the Espace Van Gogh, is open to the public.
authors on tour
Catherine Millet is best known for her memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M., an international bestseller that has scandalized, titillated and intellectually provoked readers the world over and has been hailed as one of the most important books on sexuality to be published in decades. She is also a devoted art critic, curator and founder and editor of the prestigious Art Press magazine, which focuses on modern and contemporary art.
Catherine Millet
Catherine Millet is best known for her memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M., an international bestseller that has scandalized, titillated and intellectually provoked readers the world over and has been hailed as one of the most important books on sexuality to be published in decades. She is also a devoted art critic, curator and founder and editor of the prestigious Art Press magazine, which focuses on modern and contemporary art.
blog
Time Travel
Recently, I’ve come back to Proust. I did not resolve once again, once and for all, to finish reading his masterwork (like a surprising number of my literary friends, I’d been swearing to do this for years); instead, I simply began reading him again, every morning on my way to the office on the No. 7 train, and every evening on my way home.
blog
En attendant Proust
I read Du côté de chez Swann for the first time as a sophomore and was fortunate in having a charismatic instructor introduce me to the then strange and wonderful world of Marcel Proust. Without the help of a tisane and with no madeleine, the theatrical Professor Floyd Zulli opened up a remarkable universe which beckoned me to enter.
blog
Joys and Perils of Rereading
My own introduction to Proust came first via my bookish mother, whose enthusiastic recommendation was enough to put me off for some years (such are the unfortunate vagaries of adolescence). When I finally started reading Swann’s Way it was in French, in France, when I was meant to be working on something else entirely.
