Revue parisienne de livres?

July 31, 2018 12:06 PM

I'd like to subscribe to a French-language periodical along the lines of the London / New York Review of Books. Needs to be available in print in the US. Recommendations?

I enjoy reading the LRB and NYRB, and since my French is reasonable, I'm thinking that subscribing to a French-language equivalent of these would be a good way to improve both my grasp of the language and my familiarity with French culture and la Francophonie at large.

Ideally, it would have something like the LRB's mix of book reviews, personal essays, commentary on current events, etc., and be written in a similarly engaging style. (I'd like to avoid as far as possible the rather fatuous style of some French highbrow writing -- what Peter Medawar called "tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry".) The content should not be wholly France-centered, since I don't live in France, but ideally would be balanced between France/la Francophonie and the rest of the world. A monthly or bimonthly publication schedule would be best -- I doubt I could keep up with a weekly unless each issue was quite short. Has to be available in print, not just online.

Ideas?

posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark to Society & Culture (3 answers total)

I am not aware of a LRB/NYRB equivalent. The top two French literary mags are Lire (http://www.info-presse.fr/fiches/lire_131_gp.htm) and Le Matricule des Anges (http://www.lmda.net/) but I highly doubt these would be readily obtainable in the USA, even in NY, so you would have to subscribe to them (not cheap). The Quinzaine littéraire was also good but died when its founder/editor Maurice Nadeau died. It has been replaced by En attendant Nadeau (https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/) but only on line.
posted by TheRaven at 2:31 PM on July 31, 2018

You could do worse than reading Le Monde des Livres which is a weekly supplement to Le Monde that appears each Friday. It is not published in August though so you might have to wait until September to try it out in print. Here's the link for online content: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/
posted by delphic at 5:48 PM on July 31, 2018

Another magazine is the monthly Nouveau Magazine Littéraire.
posted by elgilito at 7:25 AM on August 2, 2018