“Make America great again?” If there’s one field where this slogan does not apply, it’s literature. In the hearts of French readers, the homeland of Russell Banks (1940-2023), Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) and Paul Auster (1947-2024) – to name but a few of these recently departed legends – has always been enchanting and desirable. That’s why, every two years, audiences enthusiastically welcome North American writers to take part in the Festival America, in Vincennes in the eastern suburbs of Paris.
This year’s event runs from September 26 to 29, with headliners James Ellroy, Lauren Groff and Richard Ford. An original feature of the 2024 edition is the inclusion, for the first time, of authors from the United States and Canada (and a Mexican author, Dahlia de la Cerda), who will join around 30 of their European counterparts, mostly from France, the UK and Ireland, but also from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain.
“The event takes place between two key dates for both continents,” explained Francis Geffard, director at Albin Michel publishing house of the “Terres d’Amérique” collection and president of the festival, which he created. “Between the European elections in June and the November 5 elections in the US, we felt it was important for the festival to be a forum for discussion and debate between writers from both sides of the Atlantic.” A century after the masterpieces of the Lost Generation – when, in the 1920s, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis came to Madrid, Rome or Paris in search of inspiration – Festival America will also be an opportunity to take stock of the relationship that American authors have today with the Old Continent and its literature.
In this respect, the discussions promise to be exciting but unequal. “We need to be aware of the huge imbalance that exists between the knowledge we have, in France and elsewhere in Europe, of American literature, and the knowledge Americans have of European literature,” said Olivier Cohen, founder of Editions de l’Olivier publishing house. Indeed, it is difficult to find a European author who hasn’t been deeply influenced by one of their peers across the Atlantic. For instance, Irish writer Jan Carson described how her early works were “a jumble of themes and styles borrowed from Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and George Saunders”; or the Dutch author Inge Schilperoord, another guest at the festival, noted that Americans (like John Fante and A.M. Homes) are unsurpassable in their “depictions of alienation and emptiness.” While it is easy to find a European passionate about American literature, the reverse is far from true.
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Publish date : 2024-09-27 12:00:00
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