Vive les Livres

The French Embassy is trying to open a French bookstore on the Upper East Side, which would stock imported titles and books in translation. Fear not if you live beyond the 10022 because they will also sell online. Please help by taking this survey [in English or French], which asks how important it is to vous that the new bookshop offer "a quiet room for reading and reflection." You have two blank places in the survey to write in that you want LGBT French books like Hate: A Romance and smart gay magazines like Tetu. I also demanded French editions of translations of American novelists like Stephen McCauley's La vérité ou presque and Peter Cameron's Un jour cette douleur te servira.

Le Figaro has just published its annual list of France's 10 bestselling novelists, based on total sales of each author's books. So it's all the more impressive that young Joël Dicker (above) made #5 based on four months' sales of his prix-winning literary mystery thriller La verite a propos de l'affaire Harry Quebert about a hotshot debut novelist in New York who visits an older, blockbuster novelist in New Hampshire. The top three spots are unchanged from last year's list. The sum of top ten, roughly seven million books, represents 23% of contemporary French fiction sold last year. (Most of the links below are to English translations.)

1. Guillaume Musso: 1.710.500 exemplaires
2. Marc Levy: 1.433.000 exemplaires 
3. Katherine Pancol: 705.000 exemplaires
4. Françoise Bourdin: 512.500 exemplaires  
5. Joël Dicker: 496.000 exemplaires
6. David Foenkinos: 473.000 exemplaires
7. Laurent Gounelle: 471.000 exemplaires
8. Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt: 427.000 exemplaires
9. Grégoire Delacourt: 421.000 exemplaires
10. Amélie Nothomb: 405.000 exemplaires

Comments

[Peter Cameron]

I love it when you get demanding, Stephen.

[Deon]

I am followig your Blog for several months now and love every meoment of it. Cannot tell you how many books I have purchased since reading you. Please makeit possible fo me to write to you without going through an Outook email address which I do not want.