Village Voices
By Odile Hellier
Foreword by C.K. Williams
By Odile Hellier
Foreword by C.K. Williams
By Odile Hellier
Foreword by C.K. Williams
By Odile Hellier
Foreword by C.K. Williams
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$22.95
Sep 24, 2024 | ISBN 9781644213797
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Sep 24, 2024 | ISBN 9781644213803
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Praise
“For literature lovers, it’s a feast.”—Publishers Weekly
“Village Voices is a completely unique and cherishable chronicle of a time and a place which—if you were lucky enough to be there—gracefully invited you into the wider world’s literary imagination. Odile Hellier is incomparable.” —Richard Ford
“When I first arrived in Paris, Village Voice was the reference for its impeccable and thoughtful stock curation and the impressive list of events. Browsing their window was an invitation to a conversation. I once asked Odile how she made her selection, she replied “read, read, read, it’s all I do, every evening, every day”. I was inspired after every visit to this bookshop and now I’m inspired after reading Village Voices. Wonderfully written, this memoir of a bookseller and her Parisian bookshop, told through the literary events she hosted is a genuine treasure trove of Paris literary life between the 1980s and early-2000s. It reflects the politics and concerns of the period, and is also a compelling exploration of language, writing, and the role of the author from both an American and European perspective.” —Sylvia Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris
“This rich collection of interviews with and profiles of authors who gave readings at Heller’s English-language bookshop, which she operated in Paris’s sixth arrondissement from 1981 to 2012, presents a stimulating portrait of the Parisian literary scene replete with transporting photographs and gentle gossip. . . . For literature lovers, it’s a feast.” —Publishers Weekly
“In the early 1980s, as if seeking a fresh mission in life, a well travelled French woman, Odile Hellier, decided to open an English-language bookstore in Paris. To her considerable surprise, almost overnight the Village Voice became a Left Bank shrine to Anglo-American thought and letters. In her aptly named memoir, she recalls the extraordinary parade of visiting and ex-pat writers for whom a reading at the bookstore became something of a rite of passage. Her decision to close shop in 2012 is mourned to this day, but in these pages, she vividly recaptures the brilliance, humor and camaraderie that made the cramped space on the rue Princesse so special. Indeed, in Village Voices, Odile Hellier gives scores of writers a fresh chance to be celebrated.” —Alan Riding, author of And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.
“Every chapter of Village Voices is bursting with startling insights and revealing anecdotes. . . . Odile Hellier has given lovers of literary Paris this indispensable evocation of an era. Village Voices is a sumptuous, compulsively readable feast.”
—Jake Lamar, author of Viper’s Dream and Rendezvous Eighteenth
“In her superbly written hybrid book, Odile Hellier… offers a larger, complex understanding of stylistic inventing and social consciousness that a diverse group of major writers and translators contribute to Paris literary life… a crucial literary resource that is also thoroughly entertaining.”
—Jeffrey Greene, author of French Spirits and American Spirituals
“A song, a lyric to literature in all of its myriad forms and to those who live by it and love it. A resounding and rich chorus, truly an opera… that resonates from the first page to the last.”
—Heather Hartley, author of Adult Swim and former Paris Editor at Tin House magazine
“An intimate, fascinating glimpse of literary life in the City of Light.” —Janet Skeslien Charles, author of The Paris Library
Table Of Contents
Foreword
Prologue
Introduction
PART ONE – “Paris, Paris, Above All, Paris”
1 – It Takes a Village: A Time and a Place
2 – The Lost and Found Generation: Paris Was a Woman
Noël Riley Fitch, Shari Benstock, Joan Schenkar
3 – The Third Wave of American Expatriates and the Small Presses
John Strand, Kathy Acker, Edward Limono, Ricardo Mosner, Carol Pratl, David Applefield, Jim Haynes
4 – Black American in Paris: Updating the Myth “Remember Me”: The Legacies of James
Baldwin and Richard Wright
Gordon Heath, Julia Wright, Ernest Gaine, James Emanuel, Jake Lamar
5 – Emergence of a Literary Force: To Each Writer Their Own Paris
Diane Johnson, Steven Barclay, David Downie, David Sedaris, Edmund White
The Cultural Divide
Diane Johnson, Adam Gopnik, Edmund White
6 – From Home to Paris and Elsewhere: Irish Writers at the Village Voice Bookshop
Tributes to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
Zeljko Ivanjek, John Calder, Anne Atik
Living in Words to Tell the World
Harry Chifton and Deirdre Madden
7 – Varieties of Exile: Two Canadian Parisian
Nancy Huston, Mavis Gallant
8 – Dark Times: An Anglo-American Focus on the Vichy Regime
Raymond Federman, Carmen Callil, Alan Riding, Alice Kaplan on Louis Guilloux
Intermezzo: One Decade Ends,
A New One Begin
PART TWO – A Literary Journey Across the United States
9 – An Era of Hope Leading to Disillusionment
Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Jayne Cortez, Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hubert Selby Jr., William H. Gass, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo
10 – Bright Lights and Twilights
Jay McInerney, Jerome Charyn, Richard Price, James Ellroy
11 – Highways and Byways
Barry Gifford, David Payne, John Biguenet, Terry Tempest Williams
12 – Spectacular Sceneries, Ordinary Lives: American Writers Reel in the French Imagination
Jim Harrison, Raymond Carver, Jonathan Raban, Richard Ford, Russell Banks
13 – Four Remarkable Women Breaking from Convention
Hazel Rowley, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag
14 – Native American Renaissance: Storytelling as Repossession
James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, David Treuer
15 – “Me and you . . . we need some kind of tomorrow.” Open Wounds in African American Literature
Jake Lamar, John Edgar Wideman, Paule Marshall, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jayne Cortez, Sapphire, Toni Morrison
16 – Shadow Lands: The Here and There in American Stories of Exile
André Aciman, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Dinaw Mengestu, Junot Díaz, Azar Nafisi
17 – Memories of Silenced Lives
The Holocaust: Naming the Inexpressible
Gwen Edelman, Gitta Sereny, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Mendelsohn
Intermezzo: The Twenty-First Century is Upon Us
Adam Zagajewski, Jacques Derrida
PART THREE – Rounding Out Shakespeare’s Stage: Commonwealth Literatures
18 – Expanding Horizons: British Literature in Pursuit of Renewal
David Lodge, Antonia Byatt
19 – In the Footsteps of Salman Rushdie: Life Stories from the Indian Subcontinent
Hanif Kureishi, Abha Dawesar, Tarun Tejpal
20 – Reshaping South Africa: Moving Forward and Out of Apartheid
Denis Hirson, Breyten Breytenbach, Mandla Langa, Damon Galgut
21 – Australian Narratives: As Wide and Varied as the Country
Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Julia Leigh
22 – Multilayered English Canadian Voices: Lingering Memories of Europe
Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Michael Ondaatje
PART FOUR – Closing Ceremonies
23 – The Center Holds: Our Circle of Poets
Stephen Spender, Harry Mathews, Marilyn Hacker, Margo Berdeshevsky, Marie Ponsot, Kathleen Spivack, C.K. Williams, Ellen Hinsey, William S. Merwin
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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