I can just imagine how tickled I would have been at 13 or 14, in full francophile and feminine bloom, to have received a series of biographies of great women in French — and in graphic novel format.
Naïve is a small independent French publisher of books and music, and they’ve come out with this series called “Grands Destins de Femmes.” Subjects include Angela Davis, Dian Fossey, Frida Kahlo, Agatha Christie, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Aung San Suu Kyi and Virginia Woolf.
Now I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life… As soon as I get an iPad, that is. Which may now be sooner than I had thought because the Bibliothèque nationale de France has just released Gallica for iPad. And it’s free. The app contains 240,000 books, 880,000 magazines and 470,000 images. Also original musical scores, manuscripts and other goodies. Watch the video, and download the app (French store link).
We could wander these virtual stacks for days! So far, the Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitized more than one million works, including books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings, and made them available for free to the public at the Gallica digital library. This is France’s answer to Google Books, and the result of the big fight from a couple of years ago.
Old French Fairy Tales by la Comtesse de Ségur reminded us of the books we used to get at the library as kids… Look to the left and you’ll notice you can download a PDF of the whole book.
Enjoy this gorgeous ad, done by NeueBig in Italy, featuring stop-motion animation with paper cut-outs for the launch of Le Petit Prince Moleskine Special Edition. The cutouts you see in the video actually come with the notebooks (they differ depending on whether you get the large or pocket size).
Exile Among Expats: James Joyce in Paris is a multimedia exhibition that illustrates two entwined stories: Joyce during his Paris years and Paris during its Joyce years. At the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia through Sunday, August 28, 2011.
In the warehouses of the former shipyards in Nantes, les Machines de l’Ile project is the work of two artists, François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice, who envisioned a travel-through-time world at the crossroads of the imaginary worlds of Jules Verne and the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci. (Wikipedia)
The Steins are responsible in many ways for the turn-of-the century revolution in the visual arts through their adventurous patronage, deep ties to leading minds of the era, and legendary Paris salon gatherings.
Buy Paris France by Gertrude Stein at the Francophilia Amazon Store.
via artdaily.org, image: Gertrude Stein by Picasso
Houellebecq has won many major French literary prizes, though not the coveted Goncourt, which many in the French literary establishment feel has been unfairly withheld. He has also published several volumes of poetry and essays.
Great interview with this enigmatic and controversial author (in English) at The Paris Review.
Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds: for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence.
Referred to as L’Enfer (or Hell in French), the Bibliothèque Nationale’s collection of pornography and erotica is probably the biggest in the world. The reason why is simple: when the public library was established in 1720, its most important duty was to collect a copy of every book, etching and pamphlet produced in France.
