french toast

“French authors routinely appear in the English-speaking world's lists of the best novels ever - Voltaire, Flaubert, and Proust… sometimes Dumas and Hugo too. But when it comes to post-war literature, it's a different story. Even voracious readers often struggle to name a single French author they have enjoyed.

     France once had a great literary culture, and most French people would say it still does. But if so, how come their books don't sell in the English-speaking world?
     Is that our fault or theirs?
     And how come the French themselves read so many books that are translated from English and other languages? […]
     Even Marc Levy, whose romantic adventures have sold more than 40 million copies around the world and whose first book If Only It were True inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie Just Like Heaven, finds the attitude of UK and US publishers deeply irksome.
     ‘The caricature of a British publisher is someone totally convinced that if a book is French then it cannot possibly work in the UK market,’ he says. ‘I often joke that the only way to get published in Britain if you're French is to pretend you're Spanish. If you've been a best-seller in France, it's a sure-fire recipe for not getting a deal in the UK.
     ‘As for US publishers, they're so convinced that with 350 million potential readers and a big stable of American writers, they've got everything covered - every genre, every style. So why bother?’”
— Hugh Schofield, BBC News Magazine
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Buy all of Marc Levy's books (in French and English) here...

A Moment of the Mind

"[...]There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see [...] it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her." — Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian

What was on Marilyn Monroe's bookshelf:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Paris Blues by Harold Flender
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Fall by Albert Camus
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck
From:Media Bistro
See also: Women Reading
Photo from: Breathing Books