Village Voices - A Memoir of the Village Voice Bookshop, Paris, 1982-2012

Informationen zum Autor Odile Hellier was born in the South of France during World War II and raised in the two different regions of Lorraine, near the German border still haunted by past wars, and Brittany fronting the Atlantic Ocean. After advanced studies in Russian language and literature she taught in high school for two years, she decided to broaden her scope and work in world organizations. During the fall of 1968, Hellier enrolled in a professional school in Paris that trained translators and interpreters in international relations. Hellier is the founder and owner of the Village Voice Bookshop—a hub of Anglophone literary life and culture that operated in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris for over thirty years. This book is Hellier’s archival project and personal memoir. Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (introduction) was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Klappentext "Founded by Odile Hellier in 1982, The Village Voice Bookshop in Paris was a hub for anglophone literary life and a meeting place for French, American and English literati for over three decades. Hellier's collective memoir brings to life authors, publishers, and friends of the bookshop, and it narrates some of the most important reflections and debates of 20th century literary history. She has mined decades of archival footage to present anecdotes and insight from the spontaneous exchanges of literary and cultural icons like Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford, Raymond Carver, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Edmund White, Art Speigelman, Stephen Spender, and so many other shining lights. Village Voices is a life-long curatorial project by a bookseller trying to preserve the history of her much-loved bookstore. Her historical archive is an enduring conversation across time"-- Leseprobe I was forty years old when I opened the Village Voice Bookshop in July 1982. Oddly enough, at no moment in my previous careers did I consider selling books as a plausible profession. This surprising leap of faith would undoubtedly put me out on a limb once again. But hadn’t I always listened to my instincts and taken the road not traveled when it came to choosing one direction over another in my earlier adult life? What mattered to me was the feeling that I was going forward, even tentatively, just out of reach of some elusive, ever-beckoning elsewhere. In the immediate postwar years, children’s books were rare, yet there were plenty of stories floating around, and I enjoyed eavesdropping on adult conversations that intrigued me and teased my imagination. Recalling my early childhood, I see myself and my younger brother exploring our large garden in Nancy, my mother’s native city, or running through fields and farmlands during our summers in Brittany. I was nine years old when we moved from Nancy to Saint-Brieuc, settling permanently in this small but lively port city on the northern coast of Brittany. We lived two steps away from our public high school, named after the author Ernest Renan, also close to the picturesque cemetery overlooking two valleys and the sea in the distance where Albert Camus’s father was buried. He was not even a year old when his father was killed in 1914 at the start of the First World War. Forty years later, accompanied by his friend, the writer Louis Guilloux, a native of our city, Camus visited his father’s grave. In his posthumously published last novel, Le premier homme , the author recalls how shaken he was at discovering his father’s birth date inscribed on his tombstone, realizing that the man lying in this grave was younger than his own son.

Product details

• Authors: Odile Hellier, C.K. Williams
• Publisher: Seven stories press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.05.2024
• EAN: 9781644213797
• ISBN: 978-1-64421-379-7
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 208 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies