Essays & Ideas
The arguments animating French letters — identity, laïcité, the banlieue, the prize machine, translation.
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01
The flagship essay
The French Novel Is an Argument the Country Is Still Having
The flagship essay: how the modern French novel became the arena where France argues with itself — identity, immigration, laïcité, class, the republic — and why that makes it the most contentious literature in Europe.
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02
The Republic
Laïcité as a Literary Style
How France's particular secularism shapes not just what its novels are about but how they sound — the flattened surface, the suspicion of the sacred, the argument conducted as prose.
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03
Guène · NDiaye
The Banlieue in the Novel
Immigration, the estates and the postcolonial present in contemporary French fiction — how the banlieue moved from setting to subject, and the writers reshaping who gets to narrate France.
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04
The prize machine
The Goncourt Machine
How the Prix Goncourt makes a French literary year — the prize economy, the autumn rentrée littéraire, and what it does to the books and careers that pass through it.
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05
Barthes · Ernaux · de Vigan
The Art of Losing
Grief and mourning in modern French prose — Barthes's Mourning Diary, Ernaux, de Vigan — the particular French discipline of writing loss without consolation.
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06
Translation
In French, and in English
French literature in translation — what carries, what's lost, and how the Anglophone taste for certain French books (and not others) quietly rewrites the canon abroad.