The inkwell, and what we do with it.

L’Encrier — the inkwell — is an independent review of contemporary French letters. We read the modern French novel as an argument the country is still having with itself, and we take a side: criticism with a point of view, essayistic and unhurried, cool and contemporary rather than reverent.

The desk is the whole idea. We keep it open so you can see the working — the books we are living with, the criticism they provoke, the ideas that run beneath them. What we publish is organised into five rooms: Criticism, close readings of specific books and authors; The Modern Novel, on the form itself; Essays & Ideas, the arguments animating French letters; Voices, authors read as subjects; and a Reading List for finding a way in.

What we are not

We are not a publisher, a bookshop, a prize jury, or any author’s page. We engage real authors and works — Ernaux, NDiaye, Louis, Houellebecq, Slimani and their contemporaries — as subjects, in the third person and critically. We never write as if we were them or spoke for them.

Evergreen by design

The modern French novel is a living conversation, so we date none of our own writing. Real literary history — publication years, prizes, the record — is content, and we get it right. Everything here ships self-contained: no trackers, no borrowed feeds, only the text and the type.

A French-literary sensibility, in English. If a work’s title lives in French, we keep it in French.