Books & ideas

The Joys and Miseries of Marriage

Céline Surprenant — 2025-07-15T12:34:39Z

The “double life” of the great English novelist George Eliot combines the literary field with the experience of marriage. Her works form the crucible for reflections on love, social norms and freedom.

In Praise of the Intermediary

Piroska Nagy — 2024-09-12T07:00:00Z

“Fixers”, or dragomans, are vital intermediaries and interpreters for both journalists and soldiers in hostile terrain, and play a central role in a network of relationships and transfers. In the Middle Ages they embodied the need for otherness, and continue to do so today.

How Fiction Can Help Us Navigate the Pandemic

Chandra Mukerji — 2020-07-02T07:00:00Z

During the Black Plague, Boccaccio's Decameron provided readers ways to laugh through the pandemic. A few centuries later, a new kind of pandemic strikes: with Covid-19, the world as we knew it seems forever changed. Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

Spinoza as Groundwork for Writing Fiction

Steven Nadler — 2020-06-29T07:00:00Z

The first English translator of Spinoza's Ethics was a woman, and not any woman: the great novelist George Eliot who, before taking to writing fiction, had translated Feuerbach, David Strauss—and Spinoza. Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now. It has nothing to envy of the ones that followed.

Sontag as Metaphor

Benjamin Balint — 2020-02-13T08:00:00Z

In this new biography of Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser draws on hundreds of interviews and on the writer's restricted archives to offer a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to extremities both personal and intellectual.

Black Men and the Choice of Masculinity

Ivan Jablonka & Pauline Peretz — 2019-06-24T07:00:00Z

Why has authentic blackness been conflated with “being cool” in Northern American inner cities? Thomas C. Williams, an African-American writer living in Paris, is exploring other ways to authenticity and masculinity.

Digital Literature

Florent Coste — 2018-02-05T08:00:00Z

How does big data contribute to our understanding of Hugo, Balzac or Flaubert? A great deal, because far from being a mechanical accumulation of data on literary texts, the digital humanities transform our relationship to works and the way we read them.

Our Lives as They are Told

Pauline Peretz — 2017-12-11T08:00:00Z

Media, publishing, photography, theatre and political discourse are now shifting their attention to the lives of ordinary people. Does this move serve the need to better understand contemporary society? Sylvain Bourmeau, an actor and observer of these changes, offers some explanations.

How Can We Talk about Sexual Minorities?

Mathieu Trachman — 2017-06-29T07:00:00Z

Minority sexualities give rise to much discourse, which is more widely ranging than it is broadly disseminated. As much as the question of their actual practice, these sexualities raise the issue of how to talk about them. Halfway between essay and fiction, Marco Vidal offers some potential avenues to explore.

The Importance of Being a Dog

Vincent Boyer — 2017-03-16T08:00:00Z

Do animals have a moral life in the same way as humans do? The philosopher Alice Crary argues that they are visible bearers of moral qualities, as literature suggests. But can values be the object of empirical observation?