Belles Etrangères wrap-up

As you may know I recently went to France for two weeks as a visiting author for the Centre National du Livre’s annual Belles Etrangères festival.

I would love to do a detailed travelogue about the whole experience but I don’t see having the time in the near future. In short, it was a great trip where I met a lot of French readers, made some new friends and contacts, and ate some amazing food. And it was a lot more exhausting than I was expecting. So what I do have to offer are a few links. Of most interest might be my photo album–which I’m still editing but take a look–chronicling most of my voyages within France (Paris, Nancy, L’Aude, Corsica).

One of my fellow Beautiful Strangers, the novelist Andrew Sean Greer, put together a list where you can follow the tweets of a handful of the authors (me, Andy, Hannah Tinti, Colson Whitehead, and occasionally John Haskell). That said, one problem with Twitter’s lists is that I don’t know that you can make them time sensitive so you’ll need to scroll through a few screens of post-BE tweets from me and Colson before you reach the tour reports, but they are fun.

Sometime soon the CNL will be posting the hour-long documentary they made featuring brief interviews with all 12 authors. I’ll let you know when it’s live but you will be able to find it here.

Otherwise, here’s a radio show on Culture France where I talk briefly here about being a cartoonist invited to a literary festival (at about 6 minutes).

And here’s a video of me talking about Oulipo, Oubapo, and Jack Kirby in French:

Maybe later on I can post about some details of my evening as guest of honor at one of the Oulipo‘s monthly dinners (almost 50 years’ worth and going strong) but for now I’ll have to leave you with this photo from the end of the evening: