[L-R] The five Annies: Deborah Findlay, Anjli Mohindra, Gina McKee, Harmony Rose-Bremner and Romola Garai.
Photograph: Ali Wright
A life in five parts in a changing France is wrought powerfully on stage in this adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s book The Years
Dans cette édition illustrée de La cousine Bette (1948), l'héroïne célibataire a les traits durs, la mine sévère et triste.
Editions Albert Guillot, Paris 1948.
In his collection of stories, “The Human Comedy”, the French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac turned the shaming of single women into an art.
Harvill Secker/The Feminist Press at CUNY/Amazon Crossing/Dedalus Ltd/Deep Vellum Publishing/Other Press
Mysteries from China, short stories from the Balkans, a French-Morrocan autobiography and more.
‘Lamartine rejects the red flag in front of the town hall,’ a painting by Henri Félix Philippoteaux (1815–1884), captures a seminal moment in the second French Revolution in Paris in 1848, when revolutionaries demanded human and civil rights.
(Les Musées de la ville de Paris)
French has historically been a language of human rights. That’s why the Québec government should promote it as a tool of a human rights-based civic education, not force it on newcomers.
Marcel Proust on a French postage stamp.
Shutterstock
From electricity to X-rays, the Doppler Effect and even quantum theory, Proust’s writing is littered with physics references.
Annie Ernaux.
Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her autofiction masterpiece, The Years, has been called a modern In Search of Lost Time.
Marco Destefanis/Alamy
The French writer has won the Nobel for literature for her ascetic approach to writing and fearlessness in covering the personal and taboo.
Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano de Bergerac is missing the famous nose.
Universal Pictures
There was a real man behind the swashbuckling hero who was as deft at sparring with his pen and sword as Rostand’s hero.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr on a TV show after winning the Prix Goncourt.
Photo by Eric Fougere/Corbis via Getty Images
He is the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to lift the Prix Goncourt, one of the book world’s most important prizes. And his win matters.
Wikimedia
A story about male violence and a damsel in distress, it is based on a true crime
Portrait of French-Senegalese author David Diop whose novel has won the 2021 International Booker prize.
JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
The French-Senegalese author’s novel At Night All Blood is Black is a harrowing and politically profound story of a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the first World War.
Hugo Weaving (left) and Richard Roxburgh in Sydney Theatre Company’s Waiting For Godot in 2013.
AAP Image/Sydney Theatre Company, Lisa Tomasetti
Samuel Beckett’s first play was once most notorious for the audible yawns, walkouts (and fights) during interval. But it is a play of great insight into the condition of waiting.
Vittore Carpaccio’s portrait of a woman reading (1510).
Wikiart
The first French novelist wrote about an adulterous affair and moved to Paris after separating from her husband.
The Met
On house arrest, Xavier de Maistre took a journey around his room where he discovered there was much to wonder at.
Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix
A french classic has had a thoroughly modern update, meditating on themes of class, race and colonialism.
IMDB
Created by a prolific French author, Inspector Jules Maigret observes without judgement and moves like a chameleon between social classes.
Stéphane Bourgoin fabricated his life story, including a murdered wife.
Wikimedia
For a handful of French writers, the best fiction they wrote was their life story.
‘I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin,’ Flaubert wrote.
Photo by Nadar / ullstein bild via Getty Images
Is a 19th-century French author’s cosmic joke turning into a real-life global nightmare?
The poet in a picture by Gustave Courbet.
Wikimedia Commons
His legacy connects a great swathe of modern popular culture.
April 15, 2019, 7:34 p.m.: Notre-Dame de Paris in flames.
Leighton Kille
The fire that devastated the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral on April 15 is a historic event that reminds us of the symbolic power of national monuments.