American Library in Paris

(Hybrid) Entre Nous: The Times of our Lives with Kate Briggs and Yasmine Seale
2023-06-07 19:30 - 20:30 (Europe/Paris) | The American Library in Paris
In Kate Briggs’ The Long Form, a day takes place. A mother wakes up with her daughter, and proceeds to undertake her quotidian tasks. At the same time, she embarks upon a reflection upon the ways the everyday is made. As the rhythms of motherhood prove fertile ground for rumination upon care, love, and creation, the making of the day becomes analogous to the making of a novel, which becomes the material of the novel itself. Briggs seizes upon a lack of action in order to build a space for the slow and spontaneous wanderings of the mind. Navigating multiple levels of storytelling, time, modes of writing, and modes of thought, she elegantly sweeps through the space of the text and the history of the written word as her character sweeps through the house.
About the speakers:
Kate Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. The Long Form, her debut novel, follows This Little Art, a genre-bending essay on translation. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.
Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator based in Paris. Her essays on literature, art and film have been published in Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press). Her translations from the Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books). She is currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where she is completing a translation of The Dove’s Necklace by Ibn Hazm, an essay on the nature of love written in 11th-century Cordoba.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Briggs and Seale will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. The Entre Nous series is co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and the American Library in Paris.

(In person) Summer 2023 Writing Workshop: Form & Craft Meeting One
2023-06-08 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow and author Adrienne Raphel for a two-part writing workshop dedicated to form and craft.
In this conversation and generative session, we’ll be joined by author and professor Andrew Altschul to discuss the writing process from soup to nuts. Altschul and Raphel will lead a reading, a conversation, and a Q&A. Then, they’ll lead a writing exercise, with time to draft in the session and discuss as a group.
About the workshop:
A piece of finished writing can seem like it’s always already been in its perfect form, polished from the moment it sprung out of its author’s head. But behind the scenes, as every writer knows, the final product is only the tip of an extremely complicated iceberg.
In this two-part workshop, we’ll be exploring form and craft, focusing on demystifying the process from first draft through revision and publication. Once you have a draft of something, how do you revise it? How do you keep revising? And how do you know when it’s done?
The workshop will unfold over two main sessions. In the first session, we’ll have a reading and conversation with author and professor Andrew Altschul. In the second session, we’ll continue generating new ideas, and we’ll also focus on how to keep re-thinking prior writing. Each draft will become a touchstone for a new conversation.
This series will take place in person at the Library on 8 June and 22 June from 19h00 to 20h30 CEST and is open to both Library Members and non-members.
About the workshop leaders:
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review; What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia (2022). Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, and many other publications. She has been a featured speaker at events such as the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, and she serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton. She is currently a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and teaches with the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Andrew Altschul is the author of three novels, including most recently The Gringa. His stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Best New American Voices and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he now teaches at Colorado State University.
Advance payment and registration is required:
Members rate: 40€ per participant. (Members please register here.)
Non-members rate: 60€ per participant. (Non-members register here.)
Please email Emilie Biggs, Programs Assistant, biggs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.

History Tour at the Library
2023-06-09 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-06-23 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-06-30 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-07-07 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-07-21 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-07-28 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-08-04 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-08-11 11:00 - 12:00 | The American Library in Paris
The American Library in Paris invites you to register for a History Tour. Come visit us in person at 10 rue du Général Camou and discover:

Our origin story, when our Library warehoused a collection of books donated to the Doughboys fighting alongside Allied troupes in WWI
The establishment of the American Library in Paris as a private library
The famous writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and more) who explored our stacks during their time in Paris
Our Paris Library School, which brought American innovations to French libraries in the 1920s
The true stories of the brave Librarians who kept the Library open during the Occupation of WWII
How the Library has evolved over its 103-year history into the largest English-language lending library on the European continent

All tours are on Fridays at 11h00, last one hour, and take place in person at the American Library in Paris.
Tours are free of charge and open to the public. Pre-registration is required.
This initiative is made possible through the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation and the American Center for Art and Culture.
Please email tours@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

An Evening of Poetry with Adrienne Raphel and Megan Fernandes
2023-06-13 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join 2022-23 Visiting Fellow Adrienne Raphel and poet Megan Fernandes for a special evening dedicated to poetry. Celebrated as two of the most exciting poets of their generation, both Raphel and Fernandes experiment across form, language, and sound to generate fragmented, fleeting images of the current moment. From Fernandes’ transposition of poetry’s most traditional subject–love–to contemporary urban wastelands to Raphel’s adoption of the paranoid, compulsive registers of the Internet, the two diagnose cultural maladies of contemporary society and play with poetry as a means of reconciliation. They will discuss the uses, abuses, and varied appearances of poetry in a frantic world.
About the speakers:
Adrienne Raphel is a 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow. She is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review; What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia, forthcoming this fall. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and many other publications. She has been a featured speaker at events such as the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, and she serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton.
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in the New Yorker, POETRY, the Kenyon Review, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, among others. Her book, Good Boys, was published with Tin House Books in 2020. Her forthcoming collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, will also be published by Tin House in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a former Yaddo fellow, holds a PhD in English from the University of California, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Raphel and Fernandes will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) The Cathedrals of France with R. Howard Bloch
2023-06-14 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Saint-Denis, Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle, Reims, Amiens and Notre-Dame: in Paris and her Cathedrals, art historian R. Howard Bloch approaches each of these celebrated sites with renewed curiosity, historical rigor, and aesthetic enthusiasm. From thrilling historical intrigues to luxurious architecture and sacred relics, Bloch reanimates the past of the cathedrals, revealing their centrality to French life and identity across epochs. Join Bloch in conversation with architecture expert Barry Bergdoll at the Library as they walk us through the vaulted arches and stone passages of France’s most iconic structures, showing glimpses along the way into ways of life lost to time.
About the speaker:
R. Howard Bloch is the Sterling Professor of French and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of numerous award-winning books on French literature and art.
Currently a fellow at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination, Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University. A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he served from 2007 to 2014 as Chief Curator of Architecture & Design at the New York Museum of Modern Art. He has also organized exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay, the Caisse des Monuments Historiques and the Centre Canadien d’Architecture. He is the author of European Architecture: 1750-1890 in the Oxford History of Art series and monographs on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Mies van der Rohe, Léon Vaudoyer, and (as editor) Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Bloch and Bergdoll will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

Critical Conversations Meeting Eight: Solitude
2023-06-15 19:00 - 21:00 | The American Library in Paris
The past century has seen an explosion of single-person dwellings, rare in the previous millennia of human history. But given the ease and ubiquity of communication nowadays, our era may be one not of solitude but rather of solitude avoidance. Humans always had what we might refer to as the “contemplative gap”—accidental time when the lack of distraction, the lack of technology, brought us regularly, however reluctantly, in touch with our own inner thinking and feeling selves.
Now, with constant connectivity, interpersonal connection, and global media only ever a click away, are we eradicating solitude and becoming an externalized species? Has solitude become an act of social dissent? What becomes of the human being when solitude––as opposed to aloneness––is entirely absent? 9 This month we consider different forms of solitude and ask ourselves how important they are. What might we be missing without them?
In partnership with Analog Sea, an offline publisher of printed books, we’re delighted to announce the fourth season of Critical Conversations, an expert-led discussion series that allows Library members to ponder the most important issues of our time. This season, we will reflect on how to lead a contemplative, vital, and unmediated life in an ever-faster digital world. We will discuss questions such as: What do we gain from disconnecting, and how can we do it? How can we sharpen our senses and redirect our attention in order to change our thoughts and actions? And most of all, how can we live in contemporary society with nuance and intention?
Some details: The 2022–23 series will unfold over nine sessions, from November 2022 to July 2023. Conversations will begin at 19h00 CET and run for two hours, in person, at the Library; technology of all description is happily forbidden. Each participant will receive copies of all four Analog Sea Review volumes published so far. Course reading and discussion will, for the most part, be based on work published in The Analog Sea Review. Jonathan Simons, founding editor of Analog Sea, will begin each meeting with some opening remarks, before guiding a group discussion.
About Critical Conversations: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, and migration. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live. Please write to Emilie Biggs at biggs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.
About the Critical Conversations 2022-23 leader:
Jonathan Simons is the founding editor of offline publishing house Analog Sea and its literary journal, The Analog Sea Review. As a poet and essayist, he has written for publications including The London Magazine, PN Review, El País, subTerrain Magazine, and The Analog Sea Review. His work has been covered by, among others, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and La Vanguardia. He researched Buddhist poetics at Naropa University and McGill University and was formerly a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Humans and Machines, in Berlin.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Hybrid) The International Library Part II: Translating Traditions
2023-06-15 19:30 - 20:30 | The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
A striking example of translation and its many layers—of language, of myth, of tradition—Samantha Schnee’s new English translation of Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Eve (El libro de Eva) twists, challenges, and ultimately revises a classic tale for a contemporary moment. As Eve, fueled by “fiery disobedience,” tells her own version of the Book of Genesis, she brazenly rejects the stories that have oppressed women across millennia. No, she was not created from Adam’s rib; no, she was not expelled from the Garden of Eden for nibbling a forbidden apple; and no, humanity was not deluged by a great flood. In person at the Center for Fiction (Brooklyn, NY) and over Zoom, join Schnee and Boullosa for a conversation about translation twice (and sometimes thrice) over.
About the speakers:
Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published over a dozen novels, two of which were designated the Best Novel Published in Mexico by the prestigious magazine Reforma—her second novel, Before, also won the renowned Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel; and her novel La otra mano de Lepanto was also selected as one of the Top 100 Novels Published in Spanish in the past 25 years. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award, and has been nominated for the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award. Boullosa has received numerous prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Also a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural critic, Boullosa is a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York, and her books have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian.
Samantha Schnee is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellow in Translation, supporting her work to render Boullosa’s Gijon Prize winning novel, El complot de los románticos, into English as Dante Hits the Road. Her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She is the founding editor of Words Without Borders.
Important information: The discussion will take place at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, New York. The conversation will be streamed at the Library and on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
If you’d like to attend on Zoom OR in person in Brooklyn, please click the BLUE “ZOOM REGISTRATION BUTTON.” If you would like to attend the livestream of the event at the Library, please click the RED “GOING” BUTTON above.
About The International Library
Conversations across time, place, and language
Join the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation, and The Center for Fiction for conversations across time, place, culture, and literary tradition, with live audiences in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Paris.
At the intersection of theory and practice, past and present, as well as story and history, The International Library celebrates the live diffusion of in-person conversations in the hope of conjuring new possibilities and connecting new audiences across land and sea for a collective, intercultural experience.
Over the course of these conversations, we hope to broach the following questions about writing and translation: Who gets to translate? To be translated? How to translate? And for whom to translate? More broadly, the series will guide readers to think critically about how stories are told, investigating the points of view, the timing of the translations, and the intended or assumed audiences as well as inspiration, philosophy, and craft.
All meetings will be hybrid, taking place in person at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn (1:30pm ET) with audiences at the American Library in Paris (in Paris; 19h30 CEST) and the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (10:30am PT) for a live streaming experience. Events will run for about an hour.
Please write to Alice McCrum (mccrum@americanlibraryinparis.org), Melanie McNair (melanie@centerforfiction.org), or Leslie-Ann Woofter (leslie-ann@catranslation.org) with any questions or thoughts.

(Online) The Case for Forgetting with Lewis Hyde
2023-06-20 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
From smartphones with unlimited storage to memorials scattered across cities to pseudo-scientific techniques for maintaining brain plasticity, memory is of central importance to our society. Author Lewis Hyde asks: has memory been over-valued? Under what conditions might it be preferable to forget? Considering philosophy, art, and mythology; working through autobiography and cultural criticism, citing writers from from Hesiod to Nietzsche to Borges, Hyde develops a spiritual, therapeutic, and political case for forgetting. Ultimately, he offers a manifesto for creativity: out of oblivion, Hyde proposes, comes the artistic capacity for the radically new. Join Hyde as he walks us through his own forgotten life and instructs us in forgetting our own.
About the speaker:
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. Best known for The Gift, a defense of the non-commercial portion of artistic practice, Hyde recently published A Primer for Forgetting, an exploration of the many situations in which forgetfulness is more useful than memory. A MacArthur Fellow, Hyde taught creative writing and American literature for many years at Kenyon College. Now retired, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman.
Important information: This event is online. Attendees will receive a Zoom link upon registration. Participants will be able to pose questions through the Zoom chat function.
This event requires advance registration.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Natasha Lance Rogoff on Post-Soviet Sesame Street
2023-06-21 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Early 1990s Russia: the wall has fallen, the Soviet Empire has collapsed, and a new social order is being built from the ground up. Faced with corrupt government officials, bumbling diplomats, traumatized citizens, and rapidly globalizing capitalism, a fractured nation holds onto a last hope for the salvation of their children: puppets. Join Natasha Lance Rogoff to discuss Muppets in Moscow, the “unexpected crazy true story” of her time as lead producer on Russia’s Sesame Street. As the West dismantled the iron curtain, Rogoff was responsible for teaching the first post-soviet generation how to communicate their feelings, contribute to society, and show kindness to one another. From government raids to assassinations to clashes over puppet design, step into the world of Ulitsa Sezam.
About the speakers:
Natasha Lance Rogoff is an award-winning television director, producer and writer of more than 25 years. Her previous credits include executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russia) and producer of Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street in Mexico.) After studying at the Leningrad State University, she wrote about Soviet underground culture, as well as one of the earliest exposé of Soviet government persecution of the Russian LGBTQ community in the San Francisco Chronicle. She is now an Associate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies Department at Harvard University and lives between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City.
Edward Charlton-Jones studied History and Russian at Oxford and Harvard. He has written and lectured on the Russian emigration to Constantinople in 1918-1923, as well as on aspects of Russian literature and art. He has practiced law in Paris and Istanbul, with a focus on international energy projects.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Rogoff will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(In person) Summer 2023 Writing Workshop: Form & Craft Meeting Two
2023-06-22 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow and author Adrienne Raphel for a two-part writing workshop dedicated to form and craft.
In this workshop, we’ll continue to generate new writing, and we’ll also share and comment on previous compositions. Participants are warmly welcome to bring drafts composed anytime prior to the class, including during Meeting One. But bringing in work is not a requirement, as we’ll also be generating new work in the beginning of the session. In the revision process, we’ll focus on encouragement and guidance, rather than on critique. As a community, we’ll practice revision through inspiration. Each draft becomes the starting point for a new mode of discussion.
About the workshop:
A piece of finished writing can seem like it’s always already been in its perfect form, polished from the moment it sprung out of its author’s head. But behind the scenes, as every writer knows, the final product is only the tip of an extremely complicated iceberg.
In this two-part workshop, we’ll be exploring form and craft, focusing on demystifying the process from first draft through revision and publication. Once you have a draft of something, how do you revise it? How do you keep revising? And how do you know when it’s done?
The workshop will unfold over two main sessions. In the first session, we’ll have a reading and conversation with author and professor Andrew Altschul. In the second session, we’ll continue generating new ideas, and we’ll also focus on how to keep re-thinking prior writing. Each draft will become a touchstone for a new conversation.
This series will take place in person at the Library on 8 June and 22 June from 19h00 to 20h30 CEST and is open to both Library Members and non-members.
About 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow Adrienne Raphel:
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review; What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia (2022). Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, and many other publications. She has been a featured speaker at events such as the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, and she serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton. She is currently a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and teaches with the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Advance payment and registration is required:
Members rate: 40€ per participant. (Members please register here.)
Non-members rate: 60€ per participant. (Non-members register here.)
Please email Emilie Biggs, Programs Assistant, biggs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.

Winning at College, with Richard Montauk (ages 14–adult)
2023-06-25 14:00 - 15:30 | The American Library in Paris
This presentation by guest host Richard Montauk is aimed at students who will soon go to college (and their parents, of course). We will not cover the usual advice students receive as they head to college: “study hard, eat your vegetables, and learn—at long last—how to do your own laundry.” Instead, we’ll examine strategic academic considerations, such as:

The hidden issues concerning course selection and timing, distribution requirements, and choice of majors.
The value of methods courses, undergraduate research, writing a thesis, and aiming for nationally competitive fellowships

On the non-academic side, we’ll examine the surprising factors that drive success beyond academics, including the modern determinants of career access and success. Substantial time will be available—during and after the presentation—for questions.
About Richard Montauk: Richard Montauk is the author of a series of best-selling guides, all published by Prentice Hall, including How to Get Into the Top Colleges and How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs. His most recent books include College Interviews: The Definitive Guide and Getting into Brown: Successful Applicants’ Essays, Resumes, and Interviews. He received a BA in literature from Brown University, an MA in government from Harvard, an MS in finance, and a JD from Stanford Law School. Pursuant to a graduate fellowship, he also studied at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London). After graduating from Stanford, Richard worked as a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles, then as a corporate strategy consultant for Bain & Co. in London, before devoting himself full-time to admissions consulting. Since 1991, he has consulted to candidates for the world’s top universities, for both undergraduate and graduate programs. He can be reached through his website: www.richardmontauk.com. Important information:
This event is free for Library members, and 15€ per teen for non-members. Advance registration is required. All visitors are expected to familiarize themselves with the Library Policy for Children and the Rules and Code of Conduct so that we can provide a pleasant library environment for all patrons.
Questions about collections and programs for children and teens can be sent to the Library’s Children’s and Teens’ Services Manager, Celeste Rhoads: celeste@americanlibraryinparis.org.

(Hybrid) The Women who Refused with Jennifer Tamas
2023-06-27 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Nothing seems more counterintuitive than to turn to the society of the Ancien Régime in order to to understand female resistance. Called upon by civility treatises to demonstrate reserve, or to feign resistance by codes of seduction, one might conclude that the heroines of classical literature have nothing to teach us, and certainly not the capacity to say ‘no’. Jennifer Tamas proposes otherwise. In Au NON des femmes, she demonstrates how the women of the Grand Siècle resisted, disobeyed, and left traces of combat against a patriarchal society. From the Princesse de Clèves to Bérénice, Tamas uncovers a lineage of powerful, subversive refusals on the part of heroines, obfuscated by centuries of patriarchal interpretations. Offering a new way of reading classical texts, Tamas liberates the women of literature from the masculine gaze which has falsely rendered them submissive.
About the speaker:
Jennifer Tamas is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA). Her teaching interests range from the Old Regime to the French Revolution and explore the boundaries between passions and politics. She received her Agrégation de Lettres in 2006 and her PhD from Stanford University in 2013. She holds a further PhD in Literature and Stylistics from Paris IV Sorbonne, which she received in 2012.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Tamas will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Crafting a Project with Adrienne Raphel
2023-06-28 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Adrienne Raphel is an expert in locating the invisible yet ubiquitous and rendering it worthy of investigation–even uncanny. From uncovering hidden histories of crossword puzzle mania to deforming Internet jargon past any point of possible meaning, Raphel’s work reveals the extraordinary lurking beneath the surface of the ordinary. Over the month of June, Raphel will continue to nurture this critical approach toward the everyday as a Visiting Fellow while researching Parisian urban imagination. What are the different stages of crafting a project? What phases does it go through? When, if ever, is it complete? Join Raphel in discussing the evolutions this project has undergone and the research process itself, from initial ideas to drafting to the always nebulous notion of a finished product.
About the speaker:
Adrienne Raphel is a 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow. She is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review; What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia, forthcoming this fall. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and many other publications. She has been a featured speaker at events such as the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, and she serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Raphel will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Tim Crosland, Irmak Kanyılmaz, and Linda Sheehan on Legislating for the Future
2023-06-29 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
How can we expand our sense of time to confront the long-term (and increasingly short-term) devastation of the climate crisis? How to, moreover, legislate against this devastation? And to legislate on behalf of who exactly? The rivers and the trees? The children of the future?
This event is organized n partnership with News Decoder and the Climate Academy at the European School of Brussels.
The Library’s contribution to this joint program is supported by the Florence Gould Foundation and the American Center for Arts and Culture.
Please note the special start time of this event.
About the speakers:
Tim Crosland, a former barrister, is the Director of Plan B, a foundation supporting strategic legal action to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Irmak Kanyılmaz is a student at the European School of Belgium II. She enjoys doing research and learning about new concepts, especially in the sciences and mathematics.
Executive Director to Environment Now, Linda Sheehan guides Environment Now’s work to protect and restore California’s coastal, freshwater and forest ecosystems, for the benefit of all Californians.
Important information: This conversation will be hybrid, taking place both in person at the American Library in Paris and online.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

The Inquisitor's Tale with Adam Gidwitz (ages 6–adult)
2023-07-01 14:00 - 15:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join the Children and Teens Services staff to celebrate children’s author Adam Gidwitz, and listen as he shares stories about creating the award-winning novel The Inquisitor’s Tale, or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog. Learn how he put his research about thirteenth-century France together and mixed it up with his own stories to create this tale, then stay for a Q&A with the author!

Mr. Gidwitz will be signing books, and books will be available for purchase at this event courtesy of a local bookseller.

About Adam Gidwitz: Adam Gidwitz is the author of the Newbery Honor book The Inquisitor’s Tale, the bestseller A Tale Dark & Grimm and its companions, and the bestselling series The Unicorn Rescue Society. He is also the creator and narrator of the award winning podcast Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, and he helped produce the Emmy-nominated animated adaptation of A Tale Dark & Grimm for Netflix. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, daughter, and a dog named Lucy Goosey. She is not the inspiration for the holy dog in The Inquisitor’s Tale because there is nothing even remotely holy about her. Still, she is a good dog. Find out more here.
Important information: This event is for Library members, and advance registration is required. Caregivers are expected to familiarize themselves with the Library Policy for Children and the Rules and Code of Conduct so that we can provide a pleasant library environment for all patrons. Questions about collections and programs for children and teens can be sent to the Library’s Children’s and Teens’ Services Manager, Celeste Rhoads: celeste@americanlibraryinparis.org.

(Hybrid) The Problem of Parking with Henry Grabar
2023-07-05 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
An invisible evil holds American cities and suburbs in a deathgrip. Tying bureaucrats in administrative knots, grinding development projects, green initiatives, and housing plans to a halt, regularly ruining the average commuter’s morning, no problem is more American than the problem of parking. In Paved Paradise, journalist Henry Grabar provides an astonishing, fascinating ride through the history of parking across the American landscape, from New York to Disney World. As the U.S. faces a worsening housing crisis, and as green space disappears from urban centers, he asks: how has storing cars taken priority over human life? Join him in conversation with journalist Simon Kuper to learn how the vast American expanse has been taken captive by concrete.
About the speaker:
Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate who writes about housing, transportation, and urban policy. He has contributed to The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and other publications, and was the editor of the book The Future of Transportation. He received the Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for excellence in national reporting by journalists under thirty-five.
Simon Kuper was educated at Oxford University and Harvard. He has been working for the Financial Times since 1994, and now writes a general column for the newspaper. His recent books include The Happy Traitor, his biography of the double agent George Blake (2021) and Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club that Invented Modern Football (2021), which won the Sunday Times award for Football Book of the Year. His Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, appeared in 2022 and became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Grabar will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

Critical Conversations Meeting Nine: Freedom and Civility
2023-07-06 19:00 - 21:00 | The American Library in Paris
From Nike’s 1988 “Just Do It” campaign to Ronald Regan’s notable speech on free-market capitalism at Moscow State University of the same year, the eighties saw American conceptions of freedom shift from age-old communal pursuits to individualist ideals. Late 10 capitalism is marked by its persistent promises of liberation through consumption, and the digital lifestyle is the ne plus ultra of commodified freedom.
In this, our last seminar, we will look at freedom through a number of philosophical lenses. As individuals, what makes us free? What does freedom mean for a society, and can freedom flourish in the digital age?
In partnership with Analog Sea, an offline publisher of printed books, we’re delighted to announce the fourth season of Critical Conversations, an expert-led discussion series that allows Library members to ponder the most important issues of our time. This season, we will reflect on how to lead a contemplative, vital, and unmediated life in an ever-faster digital world. We will discuss questions such as: What do we gain from disconnecting, and how can we do it? How can we sharpen our senses and redirect our attention in order to change our thoughts and actions? And most of all, how can we live in contemporary society with nuance and intention?
Some details: The 2022–23 series will unfold over nine sessions, from November 2022 to July 2023. Conversations will begin at 19h00 CET and run for two hours, in person, at the Library; technology of all description is happily forbidden. Each participant will receive copies of all four Analog Sea Review volumes published so far. Course reading and discussion will, for the most part, be based on work published in The Analog Sea Review. Jonathan Simons, founding editor of Analog Sea, will begin each meeting with some opening remarks, before guiding a group discussion.
About Critical Conversations: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, and migration. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live. Please write to Emilie Biggs at biggs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.
About the Critical Conversations 2022-23 leader:
Jonathan Simons is the founding editor of offline publishing house Analog Sea and its literary journal, The Analog Sea Review. As a poet and essayist, he has written for publications including The London Magazine, PN Review, El País, subTerrain Magazine, and The Analog Sea Review. His work has been covered by, among others, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and La Vanguardia. He researched Buddhist poetics at Naropa University and McGill University and was formerly a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Humans and Machines, in Berlin.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

Finding the Raga with Amit Chaudhuri
2023-07-11 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
The raga, or melody form of classical Indian music, evokes profound emotion and evades tidy resolution. Singers of khayal follow a scale entirely different to Western musical styles, innovating and inventing as they perform. In Finding the Raga, Novelist, critic, and essayist Amit Chaudhuri reflects upon a life devoted to this slippery, surprising art form, as well as its interactions with his other artistic practices, from writing to American folk music. A celebration of the poetry of sound and the power of listening, Finding the Raga is both artistic manifesto and cosmology, a meditation upon music’s capacity to sing to the world, about the world, and from the world. At the Library, he will meditate upon the fusions of these different worlds, as well as the rich and unique history of Indian music, largely unknown to Western audiences.
About the speaker:
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. He is also a poet, essayist, short story writer, and musician. His New and Selected Poems is scheduled to published later this year in the NYRB Poets series. His works of non-fiction include, most recently, Finding the Raga, which received the James Tait Black Prize in 2022. Other awards his work has received include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Rabindra Puraskar, and the inaugural Infosys Prize in Literary Studies in the Humanities. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical at Ashoka University. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006-2021.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Chaudhuri will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

YA Fantasy Book Club (ages 12–adult)
2023-07-22 12:30 - 13:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join us for an animated discussion of the latest and greatest fantasy reads. Bring in your latest Young Adult fantasy read to discuss with the group. The meeting will be facilitated by Children’s and Teens’ Services Librarian (and fantasy fan) Kirsty McCulloch Reid and Front of House Assistant Sinamen MaGee.

Light snacks and drinks will be provided. Important information:
This event is free for Library members, and 15€ per teen for non-members. Advance registration is required. All visitors are expected to familiarize themselves with the Library Policy for Children and the Rules and Code of Conduct so that we can provide a pleasant library environment for all patrons.
Questions about collections and programs for children and teens can be sent to the Library’s Children’s and Teens’ Services Manager, Celeste Rhoads: celeste@americanlibraryinparis.org.

History Tour at the Library
2023-08-25 11:00 - 12:00, 2023-09-08 11:00 - 12:00 | The American Library in Paris
The American Library in Paris invites you to register for a History Tour. Come visit us in person at 10 rue du Général Camou and discover:

Our origin story, when our Library warehoused a collection of books donated to the Doughboys fighting alongside Allied troupes in WWI
The establishment of the American Library in Paris as a private library
The famous writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and more) who explored our stacks during their time in Paris
Our Paris Library School, which brought American innovations to French libraries in the 1920s
The true stories of the brave Librarians who kept the Library open during the Occupation of WWII
How the Library has evolved over its 103-year history into the largest English-language lending library on the European continent

All tours are on Fridays at 11h00, last one hour, and take place in person at the American Library in Paris.
Tours are free of charge and open to the public. Pre-registration is required. Please email us if you are reserving for 4 or more people. (Do not reserve through the site.)
Please email tours@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.
This initiative is made possible through the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation and the American Center for Art and Culture.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Hybrid) Poetic Confluence: Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr in Conversation
2023-09-05 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join Marilyn Hacker, one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, and Karthika Naïr, known for her dynamic work at the borders of dance, poetry, and the visual arts, as they discuss the many migrations of the poetic voice. When confinement forced artists into their homes, Hacker and Naïr adopted an ancient poetic technique, the renga, in order to co-author A Different Distance: a poetic exploration of distance, written at a distance, as a way of understanding and overcoming it. Hacker, an award-winning translator of French into English, and Nair, known for adapting narrative into dance performance, are masters of movement. They will consider the poetic act as that of bridging distance between disparate and linked images, sounds, languages, cultures, and forms. Learn more:
A renga is a special kind of poem that’s created by multiple poets working together. It’s like a poetic conversation where each poet adds lines to build a poem that flows from one part to another. Read excerpts of Hacker and Naïr’s renga, A Different Distance.
Marilyn Hacker won the National Book Award for her first book, Presentation Piece. She is known for writing about identity, womanhood, sexuality, illness, power, and social issues such as the AIDS crisis. A.M Juster has claimed that “there is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker. Discover her incredible career.
Naïr works with choreographers to script dances, taking into consideration the different ways environment, soundscape, and movement can combine to tell a story. See examples of this: a performance of her book Until the Lions, and a queer reimagining of Madame Butterfly.
About the speakers:
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (2023), and translator of twenty-three books of poetry and essays. She has received the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Voelcker Award from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Award in Translation, the Audre Lorde Prize and the National Book Award. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight.
Poet, librettist, and fabulist, Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance, renga written with Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year, and was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. The dance performances Naïr has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH and Until the Lions, and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Hacker and Naïr will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Meditations on Life, Politics, and Journalism with Roger Cohen
2023-09-06 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
In-person registration for this event is now closed. Please register to attend online using the link above. From China and Kyiv, to Afghanistan and Israel, to elections in Iran and the debacle of Brexit, for over forty years New York Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen has journeyed to all corners of the world to cover everything from truth and dissent, to dictatorship, revolution, and displacement.
Now, in An Affirming Flame: Meditations on Life and Politics, Cohen’s finest columns, dispatched from Tehran, China, Cairo, Libya, Vietnam, Gaza, Ukraine, Munich, Hungary, and Poland, and more, have been compiled together for the first time, accompanied by a never-before-seen essay on the state of the world. In these writings, offering an assessment of politics and journalism in the twenty-first century, Cohen traces out a path for the future of democracy. He will appear in conversation with European history expert Jacques Rupnik.
This event will be followed by a cocktail reception. Learn more:
Roger Cohen was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the invasion of Ukraine. Reporting for the New York Times, he recently traveled from Moscow to Siberia to the Ukrainian border, seeking to understand the “nationalist lurch into an unprovoked war and its mood more than 17 months into a conflict conceived as a lightning strike, only to become a lingering nightmare.” Discover what he found.
Watch Cohen’s appearance on CNN to discuss An Affirming Flame. When asked why he describes himself as a “stubborn optimist,” Cohen responded: “We have to believe in our capacity to improve the world.”
The title of Cohen’s book, An Affirming Flame, is the last line of a poem written by W.H. Auden on the eve of World War II. In the poem, Auden writes, “We must love one another or die.” Read it here.
About the speakers:
In 2023, Roger Cohen and a team of New York Times reporters were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and a George Polk Award in Foreign Reporting for their coverage of the war in Ukraine. Cohen is the Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, where he began working in 1990. He has also worked for the Times as bureau chief in Berlin and in the Balkans, where he covered the Bosnian war and received the Eric and Amy Burger Award from the Overseas Press Club of America. In 2021, he received the Légion d’Honneur from the French Republic for his work over four decades.
Jacques Rupnik was educated at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and at Harvard, is currently Research Professor at CERI-Sciences Po in Paris as well as visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. Executive director of the International Commission for the Balkans he was previously advisor to president Vaclav Havel. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Cohen and Rupnik will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. In-person registration for this event is now closed. Please register to attend online using the link above. Copies of An Affirming Flame will be available for purchase at the Library in the week leading up to this event and while the event takes place, generously provided by Smith&Son. All sales support this local independent bookstore.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.
