4 Books That Will Take You on a Literary Stroll
With summer as the season of long walks, strolls, and roaming around, here are our recommendations for literary works that escape the constraints of classification, where the authors forget the rules of composition, giving their creativity free reign to dive deeper into territories both exterior and interior.
And so we walk in Thierry Clermont’s footsteps in the streets of Galway, and then follow Jean-Christophe Bailly in those of New York City. We then join Arnaud Bertina, Mathieu Larnaudie, and Olivier Rohé while they observe a Rennes neighborhood as it undergoes a renovation. Last, join us to discover the writing of the exceptional Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik through her journal.
Reading List
“Loving a city? What does that really mean?” -JC Bailly
A thousand miles away from the ubiquitous clichés about New York (the intoxication, vertigo, eccentricity, power, energy) which continue to nourish a literature that is as fruitful as it is lacking in interest, JC Bailly examines the feelings of flotation, surrealness, and maladjustment–the state of hyper-availability that all visitors feel, but that Bailly puts into words better than anyone.
Jours d’Amérique, 1978-2011, Jean-Christophe Bailly, éditions du Seuil. Read more.
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Arno Bertina, Mathieu Larnaudie, and Olivier Rohé have had a taste for collective writing ever since they collaborated with beside Maylis de Kérangal, Mathias Enard, Hélène Gaudy, Alexandre Civico, Claro, Nicolas Richard, and many others for Inculte magazine. Though the magazine has since changed into a publishing house that releases books–both French and foreign–they share the quality of surprising the reader, taking them off the well-tread path of contemporary fiction.
Written by three authors, Boulevard de Yougoslavie discusses the renovation of a neighborhood in Rennes. The unusual thing? Everyone who lives there has something to say about it. Read more.
Boulevard de Yougoslavie, by Arno Bertina, Mathieu Larnaudie, and Olivier Rohé, éditions Inculte
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Cesar Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik’s biographer and a remarkable writer himself, wrote that not only was she “a great poet, she was the greatest, and the last.”
Born in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish at home, Alejandra made Spanish her language and most importantly her cause, her ultimate mission.
This journal, begun when Pizarnik was barely 18, states “Je suis toute entière un être littéraire” (I am an entirely literary being). More than a notebook, it is a fellow fighter, bearing witness to her struggles with solitude, abandonment, sexuality, estrangement, madness, and death. Read more.
Journal – Premiers Cahiers 1954-1960 by Alejandra Pizarnik, translation and postface by Clément Bondu, éditions Ypsilon
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Novelist, poet, and literary critic at French newspaper Le Figaro, Thierry Clermont enjoys slipping into the footsteps of authors he admires. In La Balade de Galway, he leads us to the western tip of Ireland, a land of literature and music. In front of these romantic and wild island landscapes, we become detectives, on the lookout for details that could have inspired this or that masterpiece, exhilarated by the possibility of a discovery as much as by the wind coming off the sea. Read more.
La Balade de Galway, by Thierry Clermont, éditions Arléa
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