Evenings with an Author

“What is it that a woman recognizes when she recognizes herself in another woman? This is the question that hovers in the margins of all three books in Léger’s exquisite trilogy,” Eula Biss wrote of Léger’s work in the New Yorker. “The books are extraordinary in the way they are written,” Biss adds. “Léger’s sentences give the impression that they are doing exactly what they want to do. Her paragraphs are not dutiful, not in service to the previous or following paragraphs, but exhilaratingly independent…The essay, already a flexible genre, is at its most gymnastic here, as Léger passes through the many postures of a complex floor routine to produce one fluid, circuitous movement of thought. Her style, unconventional as it is, does not feel contrived. It feels inevitable—as if these books sprang from her mind fully formed, like Athena, born of a splitting headache.”

Nathalie Léger

Nathalie Léger is the author of several short experimental novels based on her research work as a curator, as well as a volume of illustrated, aphoristic flash-fiction, published under a pseudonym. The director of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), which gathers archives and studies related to the main French publishing houses, she lives and works in Paris and in Caen. She curated two Pompidou Centre exhibitions on Roland Barthes and on Samuel Beckett in 2002 and 2007.

Eula Biss

The author of four books, Eula Biss holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and has been teaching at Northwestern University for fifteen years. Her work has been translated into over ten languages and has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other prizes. Her essays and poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Biss was the Library’s Visiting Fellow from 2020-21. The Visiting Fellowship is generously supported by the The de Groot Foundation.

The discussion is co-sponsored by Dorothy, a publishing project, which is an award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, based in St. Louis, USA. North American readers can purchase the books discussed in this event through Dorothy’s website. In the UK and Europe, these books are available through the UK publisher Les Fugitives.

The American Library in Paris's Evenings with an Author podcast is back with a new season of author talks and panel discussions, recorded live in the heart of Paris.

Does the retreat from Afghanistan mark the end of the American era, or else the start of a new one? This panel discussion focuses on President Biden’s attempt to reset America's place in a new decade of global collaboration, with a particular focus on Biden’s exit from Afghanistan and recent alliance with Great Britain and Australia. Robin Wright (the New Yorker), Steven Erlanger (the New York Times) and Serge Schmemann (the New York Times), drawing on their collective knowledge and long international careers, tuned in virtually for a moderated discussion. Hosted by Library Programs Director Alice McCrum.

Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

American Library in Paris member, Dr. Robert L. Murphy has been at the forefront of every infectious disease global crisis since the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. In this special Zoom session, Dr. Murphy will share with us the latest updates in the fight against COVID-19. He will also answer questions from the audience. He will join us from Chicago, where he is the Executive Director, Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Murphy is currently involved in cutting edge research in diagnostics and treatment of COVID-19.

Recorded 15 July 2020

For this evening of conversation, Inès Seddiki interviewed Jean Beaman about her research, including her book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. Dr. Beaman then posed some questions to Inès about her organization, GHETT’UP. Finally, the two discussed racism in France more broadly re COVID-19 and police violence. They also offered their thoughts and perspectives on the recent protests in France for Adama Traoré and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jean Beaman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was previously on the faculty at Purdue University and has held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Inès Seddiki is a French-Moroccan activist and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) professional living in the banlieues of Paris. Inès graduated with a masters degree in corporate social responsibility from Grenoble Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Pierre Mendès-France University. In 2016, she founded GHETT’UP, an organization dealing with youth empowerment and leadership in the underprivileged areas of Paris, the banlieues. 5000+ youth have been impacted by the organization’s programs.

An exploration of how distance and solitude can spur the literary imagination and how 2020-style social distance can kill it. Part craft talk, part Zoom performance, part lecture on literature, part creative self-help for the quarantined. Addressed to creative writers and readers of all stripes.

Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Denver. His first book, AERIALISTS (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and his stories have been published in American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, Guernica, the Iowa Review. He is an Assistant Professor of Fiction Writing in the University of Memphis MFA.

Please join us for an informal conversation with author Anissa M. Bouziane. Anissa was born in Tennessee, daughter of a Moroccan father and a French mother.  She grew up in Morocco, but returned to the US to attend Wellesley College, and went on to earn an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Her debut novel, Dune Song, is rooted in her experience of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers. She now works and teaches in Paris.

“I came to the Sahara to be buried.”

After witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center, Jeehan Nathaar leaves her New York life with her sense of identity fractured and her American dream destroyed. She returns to Morocco to make her home with a family that’s not her own. Healed by their kindness but caught up in their troubles, Jeehan struggles to move beyond the pain and confusion of September 11th. On this desiccated landscape, thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the Dune sings of death, love, and forgiveness.

Recorded 26 May 2020

Please join us as we check in with author Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light. This absorbing debut tells a fictionalized account of Lee Miller’s life, focusing on the years she spent in Paris and her tumultuous relationship with Surrealist artist Man Ray. An icon during her own time, Lee’s bold vision and fearlessness still serve today as a template for a life lived fully. In Whitney’s novel, we follow Lee through her time as a model, Surrealist photographer, fashion photographer, war correspondent, and gourmet chef. Whitney will discuss her book as well as provide us with updates about its reception and translation.

Whitney holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, The Age of Light, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a 2019 coup de coeur selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published or is forthcoming from over a dozen other countries. Whitney has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale, a St. Botolph Emerging Artists Grant, and a Somerville Arts Council Artists Fellowship. She teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series.

*Covid-19 Update: Although our physical space has temporarily closed, the Library will continue with its Evening with an Author programming during the period of confinement. Our events will continue to be free and open to the public via Zoom. We have moved the events up, to begin at 17h00 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Recorded 5 May 2020

Please join us as we check in with author Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light. This absorbing debut tells a fictionalized account of Lee Miller’s life, focusing on the years she spent in Paris and her tumultuous relationship with Surrealist artist Man Ray. An icon during her own time, Lee’s bold vision and fearlessness still serve today as a template for a life lived fully. In Whitney’s novel, we follow Lee through her time as a model, Surrealist photographer, fashion photographer, war correspondent, and gourmet chef. Whitney will discuss her book as well as provide us with updates about its reception and translation.

Whitney holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, The Age of Light, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a 2019 coup de coeur selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published or is forthcoming from over a dozen other countries. Whitney has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale, a St. Botolph Emerging Artists Grant, and a Somerville Arts Council Artists Fellowship. She teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series.

*Covid-19 Update: Although our physical space has temporarily closed, the Library will continue with its Evening with an Author programming during the period of confinement. Our events will continue to be free and open to the public via Zoom. We have moved the events up, to begin at 17h00 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Recorded 5 May 2020

Please join us for a fun and informal talk by author and professor Susan Harlan, who has the rare gift of making the ordinary extraordinary for her readers and audiences. Susan will share with us a personal essay about the tote bags she’s acquired on her travels and throughout her life, touching on themes that are at the forefront of our minds right now: travel, home, souvenirs, including unused bags and luggage. In her words, “I keep looking at my purses on my coat rack and thinking how strange it is to not carry a purse anymore. They just hang there, and then every eight days or so I go to the store. Beyond the present circumstances, the tote bags make up a kind of autobiography, and they tell stories about where they are from and what they have toted around.”

Susan Harlan’s essays have appeared in venues including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads & Kingdoms, Literary Hub, The Common, Racked, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Bitter Southerner, and Public Books. Her book Luggage (Bloomsbury, 2018) takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. She also writes satire for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Billfold, Avidly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Hairpin, The Belladonna, Janice, and The Establishment, and her humor book Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael, and Other Literary Notables was published by Abrams last October. She teaches English literature at Wake Forest University.

*Covid-19 Update: Although our physical space has temporarily closed, the Library will continue with its Evening with an Author programming during the period of confinement. Our events will continue to be free and open to the public, via Zoom (please RSVP here to receive meeting details and password). We have moved the events up, to begin at 17h00 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Recorded 28 April 2020

Please join us for an informal and uplifting check-in with author and journalist Elaine Sciolino. Following country-wide quarantine measures put in place by the French government, Elaine is confined on the Rue des Martyrs, the subject of her 2016 book, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs. Despite the circumstances, this unique Parisian quartier–and its residents–retain a certain degree of pre-Covid 19 life and charm. In Elaine’s words, the Rue des Martyrs is “a half-mile celebration of the city in all its diversity with rituals and traditions and a feeling of community that goes back decades. It does not belong to monumental Paris — you won’t find it in most Paris guidebooks — and it has managed to retain the feel of a small village.” Tune in to our event to see how Elaine is experiencing confinement, what new hobbies she’s acquired, and get the latest news on her most recent book, The Seine: The River that Made Paris.

Elaine is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, based in France since 2002. In 2010, she was decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States.

Covid-19 Update: Although our physical space has temporarily closed, the Library will continue with its Evening with an Author programming during the period of confinement. Our events will continue to be free and open to the public via Zoom. Each event will be capped at 100 participants. We have moved the events up, to begin at 17h00 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Recorded 21 April 2020