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35 Parisian New Year's Resolutions

Image: I Still Shoot Film

Text: Guillermo Martinez de Velasco

1-Don't go to the Eiffel Tower on New Year's Eve

2-Actually do that thing where I pick an area of the Louvre per week, and visit it very attentively

3-Buy a bicycle and throw away my carte imagineR

4-Actually go to Château de Vincennes, not just talk about going

5-Promise to go to one of the presentations/lectures/workshops at Beaubourg or the Fondation Cartier per month

6-Don't cheap out on French Vogue or Egoïste

7-Finally get my membership for the Hôtel-de-Ville Library and The Bibliothèque Fornier / Go study in these libraries

8-Get photographed by The Sartorialist, at least

9-Volunteer at Shakespeare and Co. (But also check out the Abbey Bookstore)

10- Promise to learn more about wines, it's embarrassing that you always go for the 4-5 euro Bordeaux

20 Questions with Sylvia Whitman

Sylvia Whitman is the proprietor of book shop Shakespeare & Co.

1. What initially inspired you to move here or visit? 

My Father George Whitman.

2. Earliest Paris memory?

Standing on a street grid and having hot metro air blow up my dress.

3. Best neighbourhood you've ever lived in?

I want to do what the French writer Colette did which is to move every year and try each arrondissement (except maybe I’ll skip the 16th). For now, it would be where I currently live : Etienne Marcel. From my front door, take a left and you get to watch all the fashionistas doing a catwalk on the rue Montorgeuil, take a right and peek into the sex shops on rue St Denis. I like that combination.

4. What's the best meal you've eaten in Paris?

It would have to be that amazing white night meal – it happens every year in a secret location. When I went it was on Place de la Concorde. 8 000 people eating a white meal in white on the Place, it was one of the most civilised, magical meals – I think about it every time I pass Concorde.

5. Sexiest moment you've had in Paris?

A more than romantic kiss in a church kissing someone I shouldn’t.

VINGT Paris Presents Artist in Residency

   

 Image: Towards Architect, Hannu Karjalainen

We're very happy to announce that Hannu Karjalainen (Helsinki, Finland) will be the first artist in residency within the Paname Fibres project by VINGT Paris.

Working mainly with video and photography, his "artist studio" is his sketchbook itself, which he brings with him wherever he goes. 

The Book Club celebrates A Tale of Three Cities

Image: taleofthree.com

Text: Emily Ruck Keene

This weekend Paris officially inaugurates A Tale of Three Cities, an exciting arts journal linking the creative minds of Londoners, Parisians and Berliners, at cocktail bar/lounge Le Carmen in the 9th arrondissement, Paris, this Friday evening (28th October). For those unable to come in the evening, Shakespeare & Co. is hosting a tea party on Saturday. If the event itself wasn’t enticing enough, cucumber sandwiches and artisanal cupcakes have been mentioned...

Since the hugely successful Book Club parties first started at Le Carmen - a classy round-up of the biggest bookworms in Paris held on the last Wednesday of every month - literary enthusiasts in Paris have been eagerly anticipating the launch of A Tale of Three Cities (“Europe’s golden triangle”) for which The Book Club has been drumming up publicity. And a nice little job of promotion it did too, as well as probably doing a lot to boost European relations.

A Tale of Three Cities promises to offer a refreshing and inspiring selection of both upcoming and established writers. It is hard to publish independent arts journals, especially in Paris - a city on whose pavements are embedded the footsteps of the greatest flaneurs and academiciens in literary history - where contemporary voices are not easily picked out. Any attempt to do this deserves celebrating in style with cocktails and obligatory bookworm-chic rimmed glasses.

Poésie et Prose

Text: Emily Ruck-Keene

The Irish cultural centre in the 5^th arrondissment is known for a consistently high-quality events programme, celebrating a wealth of Irish culture in all art forms. This month, from October 20-22, it is putting on a packed weekend of free poetry and prose, where readings include works from both contemporary Irish and English language writers. Friday evening will have a memoir theme, Saturday afternoon has been organised to appeal to a younger audience, and Saturday evening will examine the detective novel, or polar (slang for roman policier).

Even before Dublin being crowned the fourth UNESCO City of Literature earlier this year, Ireland has never needed to prove her literary credentials. Amongst other writers, the event will feature familiar faces such as Jennifer Johnston (former Whitbread Book Award winner) and Keith Ridgway (whose next novel Hawthorn & Child is to be published in 2012). Poets will be represented by Enda Wyley and Michael O’Loughlin, whose Widow’s Prayers feels like the brilliant and coarse result of letting Stephen Dedalus wander around The Waste Land while reading Proust. As the publicity for the event proudly states, “his poetry has a marked visual quality”.

For me, it is the soirée polar which presents the biggest attraction during the event. It will be especially fascinating to hear Declan Hughes on the subject, whose novels add a contemporary twist to the hard-boiled American novel. Ireland has so much to contribute to this genre with its history of violent secrets: from the religious to the political, lower to upper class. It is appropriate that this evening should take place in France, where the polar developed a dark and political shade with writers like Didier Daeninckx using crime fiction as a vehicle for crime truths.

20 Questions

Adam Biles is a writer and translator. His novella Grey Cats was a finalist for the Paris Literary Prize.

1. What initially inspired you to move here or visit?
The need to get away from London. The absurd notion that Brassai’s Paris, Miller’s Paris, Hemingway’s Paris, still existed.

2. Earliest Paris memory?
Rolling through the northern suburbs on the Eurostar and thinking, “What kind of grim dystopia have I come to?”. I hadn’t yet watched La Haine.

3. Best neighbourhood you've ever lived in?
My first flat in Paris overlooked the Canal de l’Ourcq, fifth floor. I shared a room with my brother. It could never have lasted. It didn’t.

4. What's the best meal you've eaten in Paris?
For my 30th, with a group of close friends at Les Papilles. Great company, great food – and for someone who doesn’t handle the abundance of choice well, the set menu was a blessed relief.

Interview: Rosa Rankin-Gee

Image: Amaury Choay
Text: Haxie Meyers-Belkin

Rosa Rankin-Gee is the recent winner of Shakespeare & Company's 2011 Paris Literary Prize, proud co-founder of The Book Club at Le Carmen (think gorgeous people swapping books in sumptuous surroundings – an en masse flirtation opportunity masquerading as literary night out) and general international woman of merriment. Here, she gallantly answers some questions about life as a young writer and the ever-elusive perfect Parisian coffee.

When did you first start writing?
It’s terribly soundbite-y, but I think as soon as I could write, I started writing stories. That should be “stories” - they’d normally be about foxes or my father, and would simultaneously be very short and make no sense. My mum still has one on the wall, above her desk. The spelling almost looks Norse.

Have you got any particular writing routine – lucky trolls and such like?
Yes, I have a writing balaclava. No, no funny clothes or lucky eggs. I like to have a window to look out of, people to look at, coffee and not to be hungry. Can’t do anything if I’m hungry.

Where do you draw inspiration from?
What I see, what I hear. My friends, and things that happen to us. I think I should grow up and start reading the papers.

Foreign Correspondent: Peter Lennon's Paris

Image: The Guardian
Text: Aidan Mac Guill

Peter Lennon died in March of this year at the age of 81. He worked throughout the 60's as Paris correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, and also worked for the Sunday Times, the BBC and The Irish Times. He produced, alongside Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard, the groundbreaking and controversial documentary film The Rocky Road To Dublin, and had short stories published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

Lennon detailed his time in Paris in a book, Foreign Correspondent - Paris In The Sixties. He left his native Dublin and arrived in France at the end of the 1950's, attempting to find work as a journalist. He got his break as a foreign correspondent in his mid-twenties when a train he was travelling on, full of Irishwomen returning from Lourdes, struck a lorry at a level crossing. 'Miraculous escape of Irish pilgrims to Lourdes' was the front-page splash the next day.

He eked out a living contributing articles to Irish newspapers The Irish Times and The Sunday Press, giving English lessons for extra cash on the side. Jumping from cheap student hotel to cheap student hotel, he eventually settled in the 6th, making cafes like the Select, the Tournon and the Monaco his home. "For a short while, an area of hardly more than one square mile supplied all the emotional, intellectual and erotic needs of my life," he wrote.

Oliver Burkeman And The Happiness Industry

Image: Oliver Burkeman / Canongate Books
Text: Aidan Mac Guill

Five years ago the journalist Oliver Burkeman embarked on a mission, a mission that might sound about as enticing to some of us as a bout of gastroenteritis, but a mission nonetheless. He decided, through his weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, to explore the world of self-help books; taking a rational, reasonable, journalistic approach to an area not always synonymous with rationality or reason (or indeed reality).

“I think everyone on some level would like to be a bit more happy, or efficient, or achieve their goals,” he explains in a phone interview from New York, where he lives. “I very much doubt that most of these books are going to contain the answer to that, but there's a tiny little part of you that thinks: it would be fantastic if they did.”

“That was the idea, to sort the wheat from the chaff, knowing that there would be a very large amount of chaff,” he says.

What has emerged from the project is a book, Help! (modestly subtitled 'How To Become Slightly Happier And Get A Bit More Done'; modesty being another quality often foreign to the world of self-help). It is an insightful, remarkable account of what could slightly pretentiously be termed the modern condition; how the technological and societal changes of recent times have impacted on our psychology, and our age-old search for happiness. Also it's very funny.

Paris Literary Prize 2011

Thursday evening saw the announcement of the winner of Shakespeare & Company’s 2011 Paris Literary Prize, awarded to an unpublished writer of a novella of between 20,000 and 30,000 words. The prize itself was 10,000€ and a weekend in Paris, generously donated by Charles and Clydette de Groot (of the de Groot Foundation). There were well over 400 entries sent in, each of which was read by at least 6 of the team of 15 or so readers - a staggering feat in itself by Shakespeare & Company! Every text was also anonymous, ensuring that the works would be judged on nothing but their content.