“Make America Great Again” If there is one area where this motto does not apply, it is literature. In the hearts of French readers, the homeland of Russell Banks (1940-2023), Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) and Paul Auster (1947-2024) – to name just these recently deceased giants – has never ceased to be captivating and desirable. Moreover, every two years, the public enthusiastically welcomes American writers who come to participate in the Festival America in Vincennes (Val-de-Marne).
This year, this major event will take place from 26 to 29 September, with headliners James Ellroy, Lauren Groff and Richard Ford. Originality of the 2024 vintage: for the first time, American and Canadian authors (and one Mexican author, Dahlia de la Cerda) will meet around thirty of their European counterparts, mostly from France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, but also Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain.
“The event takes place between two important dates for both continents.explains Francis Geffard, director of the “Terres d’Amérique” collection at Albin Michel and president of the festival he created. Between the European elections in June and those in the United States on 5 November, we thought it was important that the festival be a place of exchange and debate between writers on both sides of the Atlantic. A century after the masterpieces of the Lost Generation – When, in the 1920s, Hemingways, Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis came to Madrid, Rome and Paris to seek inspiration, America was also an opportunity to take stock of the relationship that American authors have today with the Old Continent and its literature.
In this sense, the exchanges promise to be exciting but asymmetrical. “We must be aware of the enormous imbalance that exists between the knowledge we have, in France and elsewhere in Europe, of American literature, and the knowledge that Americans have of European literature.”“It is difficult to find a European author who has not been deeply influenced by one of his peers from the other side of the Atlantic,” says Olivier Cohen, founder of Editions de l’Olivier. “In fact, if it is difficult to find a European author who has not been deeply influenced by one of his peers from the other side of the Atlantic, you should listen to the Irish author Jan Carson tell us about her first writings.” “a mishmash of themes and styles [empruntés à] Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver and George Saunders » ; or the Dutch Inge Schilperoord, another guest of the festival, explain why the Americans (John Fante, AM Homes) are unbeatable in their “paintings of alienation and emptiness”… –, if, therefore, it is difficult not to find a European passionate about American literature, the opposite is far from true.
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