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Ta-Nehisi Coates panel. © Siriot de la Petra.
This summer, Festival America, a four-day event that is not in America, released its trailer—a supercut of iconic imagery spanning the history of the United States. Native American men riding horses. A portrait of George Washington. The site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Men digging a mass grave. Suffragists parading. Troops storming Normandy. A mushroom cloud. A rocket launch. And text:
Littérature.
Expositions.
60 autrices et auteurs américains.
Next came the headshots of John Grisham and Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Kasischke and Ta-Nehisi Coates, superimposed over scenes from the March on Washington. Next, a ticker tape of sixty names, one of them my husband’s, scrolled across footage of men marching into war. The mostly black-and-white montage switched into color as Ronald Reagan signed a bill and a plane smashed into the Twin Towers.
Festival America, which is held every two years, typically invites authors from across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean whose works have recently been translated into French for a series of panels and workshops in Vincennes, a town just outside Paris. But the 2026 lineup was 100 percent from the U.S.A. in honor of the country’s semiquincentennial. Among those invited were Alison Bechdel, Tommy Orange, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Patrick Radden Keefe, and many more of our nation’s best-known working writers, plus my husband, Jake, who was suffering from an acute case of impostor syndrome.
To say Jake was surprised to be included in this lineup is an understatement. His debut novel, Slime Line, was published so quietly by a university press that when he signed with a larger imprint in New York for his next book, his editor still referred to him as a “debut author.” Nevertheless, a major French publisher acquired Slime Line—or as it’s known in French, Alaska Parano—and two years after its U.S. release, we flew from Pennsylvania to Paris to find that he’d amassed a not-insubstantial Francophone following. His book was front and center on the NEW AND NOTABLE table at the bookstore near our hotel. It was there, too, at a bookstore on the next block. And guess who was a STAFF PICK at Shakespeare and Company.
Jake was beside himself with a confused sort of glee. The fawning messages he’d received from French-language accounts on Instagram were beginning to make sense. One post praised his novel—which is based on his experience working in the commercial-fishing industry—for being a beautiful treatise on the “solidarity of magnificent losers.”
Around this time his French publicist reached out. She wanted to know if he would speak to a journalist at a major French magazine for a profile as the “new voice of America.” Evidence was mounting that Jake’s work was touching a very specific French sensibility. In Vincennes, I made it my mission to find out what.
*
That’s not exactly true. That’s just something journalists say to end their opener with a little narrative thrust. Getting to the bottom of French literary sensibilities was more of a secondary reason for me, trailing wine and cheese. On the festival’s first full day, authors and their plus-ones were invited to a “cocktail lunch” at the Château de Vincennes, the seat of French kings from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. There, we chewed on skewered radish slices, thin breads topped with charcuterie, and pert meringues in the shadow of the tallest donjon in Europe.
Château de Vincennes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Over drinks, I asked the festival’s head interpreter if there was any historical torture equipment around. She told me that the most terrible death at the château had less to do with torture than with disease. During the Hundred Years’ War, King Henry V of England had retreated there shortly after the Siege of Meaux. He’d just conquered Normandy and was near to becoming king of France. But the man barely had time to settle into his new digs before he got dysentery and died. That was in 1422.
Observing the United States’s birthday in Europe is a reminder that we have a minuscule history—a cultural handicap that our literature must overcome. “Compared to Europe,” the festival’s founder, Francis Geffard, told me, “it’s very recent.” Nevertheless, two hundred fifty is a pleasingly round number, and he saw “a good occasion” to make this year’s festival about the U.S. It also allowed him to pursue what might seem like a lofty goal: to assemble enough American authors, spanning generations, geographies, and identities, to see once and for all “what American fiction has to say to readers outside of America.”
This seems like an impossible task until you remember the one thing that unites American writers, old and young, established and emerging: they will nearly always accept a free trip to Paris. As Francis told me, “It is very unusual for a writer to turn down the invitation.”
*
After cocktail lunch, Francis was moderating “The French Taste for American Literature,” a roundtable with three Francophone experts on American letters, at the Hôtel de Ville, Vincennes’s nineteenth-century town hall. To enter the building, I had first to walk along a red carpet, flanked by a photography exhibition featuring, among others, an image of terrified migrants paddling across the Rio Grande. Inside, more than two hundred people had climbed the grand staircase to the marriage hall, where frescoed aristocrats looked down from the walls. The previous festival had drawn sixty thousand people—the press team didn’t seem to think this year’s turnout would be any less.
This was a French-language panel, and Francis’s questions hinted at certain shared assumptions among French readers. “We agree that American writers aren’t quite the same as, say, French writers,” began one. “From France, we often tend to imagine the United States as a country without culture,” began another.
One of the panelists was Sébastien Bonifay, a Corsican writer and bookseller who traveled to the U.S. more than twenty times to visit his favorite American authors at their homes, often for days at a time. His recent book, (Not) Born in the USA, recounts meetings with James Ellroy, Chris Offutt, Donald Ray Pollock, Stuart Dybek, James McBride, and more. These are known names, if not exactly those an American would pick. “The literature that nourishes me,” he said, “is an American literature that Americans don’t like.”
He called it “a literature of the margins,” and panelists riffed on what those rough edges were. One placed marginal American literature in a lineage of countercultures that rail against l’establishment (anglicism, pejorative)—rock and roll, psychedelia, punk. Another said that the United States has two literatures: one of “the coasts” and one of “the other,” rarely published but often excellent. This thrilling literature of the margins was often published by universities, which, the panelist said, “have wonderful presses.” It didn’t matter that this type of book didn’t always achieve mainstream acclaim; the panelists seemed to trust their own taste.
The more the panelists riffed, the more they came to describe my husband. A panelist brought up the idea of “an American-style résumé”—belonging, it seemed, to someone who fits writing in between blue-collar gigs. The panelists called this type of writer “artisanal,” someone “whose real-life experience shows through in their work.” This writer “had lived.” And this writer had done so in places the French reader could hardly imagine, like Ohio.
It’s in this misunderstood land that Sébastien begins his book: in a Wendy’s parking lot, sweating with anxiety about his impending visit to Donald Ray Pollock’s house. After the panel, I found Sébastien sitting behind a stack of copies in the book-signing tent, and he told me he fell in love with American literature at fourteen, reading Stephen King. It wasn’t the horror that gripped him; it was the way King described small American towns. Before a single plot twist even dropped, Sébastien was entranced by Derry, King’s fictional Maine hamlet. This pleased me, as someone from an American town.
“The writers who have a lot of success in France,” he said, often aren’t as successful at home, and sometimes “are not even published in America.” I asked him why French people liked American literature that doesn’t get much attention in the U.S. He had a theory about this. “French people, they’ve got a problem with America,” he said. “We are fascinated by America. But we truly, deeply think we should be, as France, as a country, where America is.”
For one, France has so much more history, whereas the history of the United States is terribly short. That’s why many of the American books that become popular in France show America’s darker, shittier, seedier side. He pointed to Benjamin Whitmer, an American writer whose noirs have a much larger audience in France. Sébastien visited Whitmer in Colorado as part of his series of pilgrimages to the United States.
“This guy has got thirteen guns,” Sébastien told me. French people think owning a gun means you’re a redneck, he said. But when Sébastien visited him in Colorado, Whitmer asked him about Maurice Blanchot. “Maurice Blanchot!” The fact that someone could own thirteen guns and be a fan of the French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot was significant enough to warrant repetition. “Benjamin Whitmer knows Maurice Blanchot,” he said. “He reads Maurice Blanchot, and he’s got thirteen guns.” He moved his fist emphatically, then clarified. “One of them is for the grizzlies. One of them is for the coyotes.”
To Sébastien, Whitmer was one kind of writer, to be juxtaposed against another. “It’s just my opinion, but these writers are a lot better than the other ones,” he said. “Really, I don’t care about Jeffrey Eugenides! Really, I don’t care.”
*
© Siriot de la Petra.
Elsewhere in the bookselling tent, Jake, the proud author of a title published by West Virginia University Press, was already flying through book sales. He had just spoken to a class of teens who had mobbed him like a rock star. When I told him about Sébastien, he said, “That guy rules. I think he wants us to come to Corsica.”
A long queue for Joyce Maynard snaked around the booths. I introduced myself to two women thumbing through books, asking them what they liked about American literature. “The stories, the journey, the wide-open spaces, and all that,” said the younger one, who quickly turned her own questions on me. They had come here to learn about America, and here I was, a real, live American. At their prodding, I told them about my husband’s work.
“Ah, that wouldn’t exist here, someone who writes about being a fisherman,” the woman said. “In France, it’s more l’establishment.”
I asked what she meant by l’establishment.
“Professionals,” her companion clarified. “I thought your husband would be more like a banker, to be writing about capitalism.”
To understand French literature today, the younger went on, I ought to consider the woman in the black hat with the red lipstick. “She has her own myth,” the older woman said.
I’ll confess that at this point, I assumed my French was failing me. The older woman had just made a point about le wokisme that I couldn’t quite follow and, out of fear, didn’t ask her to clarify. But I looked up the lady with the black hat and red lipstick later, and it turns out they were speaking about Amélie Nothomb, a Belgian-Francophone novelist with a penchant for wearing large hats and appearing on TV. She was named a baroness by King Philippe.
There seemed to be all sorts of fashionable characters floating around the French literary world. The novelist Rob Franklin told me he was at the festival’s opening ceremony when an older woman named Sophie introduced herself to him. She was around ninety and striking, with a pixie cut and an eccentric style. Rob had been told that his French editor was named Sophie. This woman asked if she could take his picture. “I was like, ‘Okay, sure. My publisher wants to take my photo,’ ” he told me. Sophie pulled out a monocle to look at her schedule. Then she did a portrait session with him.
The next day, Rob went to meet Sophie at his publisher’s tent. It was a different woman. He spent the festival wondering who the hell had taken his photo until the last day, when Sophie No. 1 found him again and handed him her business card. It turned out she was France’s most famous photographer of writers, and she’d been doing it for sixty years. “I found out she’s like … quite famous,” he told me. On her card was a black-and-white portrait she’d taken of Michel Foucault.
*
There was one person I wanted to ask about the word l’establishment: Fabienne Gondrand, a literary translator who served as Jake’s interpreter throughout the festival. Fabienne had sat beside him on panels, repeating his comments in French. I told Fabienne that a few people had used this word with me to pinpoint the differences between French and American contemporary literature. I wondered if she, too, thought American writers were more anti-l’establishment.
“That’s a little reductive,” she said, seeming surprised. She thought perhaps the people I’d spoken to had used that word because the festival had done a good job curating diverse voices, such as nonwhite and Indigenous writers whose works explicitly challenge American cultural norms. It occurred to me that I had perhaps oversimplified what French readers had intended l’establishment to mean. I’d developed a self-serving theory that the writing world consisted of two camps (coastal literati and scrappy Rust Belt writers with jobs) and that in France, everyone recognized the latter as superior. This is silly, when l’establishment is so obviously not writers in major metro areas with big book deals. L’establishment américain, really, had been invited and declined. I’m talking about Charles Kushner.
At every edition of Festival America since 2002, Francis told me, the U.S. ambassador to France has given a speech on opening night. Currently, that position is held by Kushner, the real-estate developer and pardoned felon. The U.S. Embassy typically forks over a little cultural funding for the festival—less than the Canadian embassy, but not nothing—and this year they slashed their contribution by 80 percent. Francis took this as a sign of distrust and refused the embassy’s money altogether.
Francis told me that French people “are feeling a little estranged” from the U.S. at the moment. Shortly after we spoke, Festival America distributed a press release with sharper wording. “Ironically,” it said, this funding cut had occurred during “the very year of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” when the festival was hosting the largest delegation of American writers ever “in our country, and likely in Europe or anywhere else.”
The festival is right to point out the rarity of this delegation, as these writers would rarely be grouped together. On home turf, they’d more likely be gathered by subject matter, identity, or genre, because in the U.S., “American” is not a uniting descriptor—we’re too close to see clearly. But in Vincennes, we can step back and see the whole picture. What struck me about French readers was their confidence in their own taste, in how it could supersede that of most American readers. But French people have been gazing upon America their whole lives. When I returned from the festival, I found myself in a rare moment of America gazing back. Kushner’s embassy was advising Americans to “exercise caution.” Since the festival, student protests there have erupted into widespread riots, and I think we could safely say those were aimed at l’establishment.
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