Top US authors to gather in Paris for American literary festival

Starting Thursday September 24th until Sunday September 27th, the four-day festival will bring authors including Joyce Carol Oates, John Grisham, Louise Erdrich, Jay McInerney, Peter Heller and Kathryn Stockett to the Paris suburb.

“Bringing together more than 50 American writers is exceptional. It has never happened outside the United States,” Francis Geffard, the festival’s founder told AFP.

Held every two years since 2002, the festival is expecting more than 40,000 visitors this year. Organisers say the event will attempt to take stock of the United States, 250 years after its independence.

“People are very eager to hear what the authors have to say because the whole world is somewhat bewildered by America and is wondering where this country is headed,” said Geffard.

For the first time, however, the festival will take place without financial support from the US embassy in France or the US State Department. Festival organisers announced on Monday that they had rejected a proposal to cut their funding by 80 percent. The US government grant represented only around three percent of the festival’s total budget.

French readers still keen on US literature

Despite Trump’s unpopularity in France, there appears to be little sign that French readers have turned away from American novels.

The success of Laura Kasischke’s Baignade surveillée (The Lifeguard), published by Gallimard, is one example. The novel is among the notable releases of France’s autumn literary season.

“There is no sign of any rejection in the booksellers’ figures,” said Olivier Gallmeister, head of the publishing house that bears his name and which specialises largely in American fiction.

“Readers distinguish between the administration and writers, most of whom are opposed to Trump,” he said.

Among them is Joyce Carol Oates, 88, who recently accused Trump of being “the first president in history to deliberately encourage people to hate and divide each other,” in an interview with Vanity Fair. 

A long fascination with America

France’s enthusiasm for American writers goes back decades.

“More than any other country, France has dreamed a lot about America, thanks in particular to its writers,” said Geffard, who also runs Albin Michel’s Terres d’Amérique collection.

American culture has been shaped in the French imagination by writers including Jack London, John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King.

“American literature is popular in France because it is both very familiar and very exotic,” Gallmeister said. “It is familiar because French people know the codes of American culture through westerns, Hollywood films, TV series and cartoons. But it is also exotic because Americans have different relationships with subjects such as nature, guns and politics”, he added.

For more than 20 years, French publishers have also sought out American novelists who are sometimes little known in their own country and who live far from the literary centres of New York and California.

Gallmeister’s publishing house, founded in 2006, has published more than 150 American novels, including Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling, which has sold around 400,000 copies in France, David Vann’s Sukkwan Island and Tiffany McDaniel’s Betty. The latter was recently adapted into a graphic novel as part of a new collection launched by French publisher Le Lombard.

American authors are also particularly prominent in science fiction and non-fiction, with Truman Capote among the best-known names. And then there are the page-turners, such as those by John Grisham. His latest novel, The French Illusion, due to be released in the US on September 29th, is a spy thriller set in Paris.

More info on the festival here.