InvestigationFor more than a century, the intelligentsia from across the Atlantic has enjoyed itself in the French capital. Novelists, academics or press correspondents find there a passion for the arts and an open-mindedness that America lacks.
It was before the Covid-19, before the closure, reopening, re-closing of “non-essential” businesses. On the ground floor of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, on the banks of the Seine, on the left bank side, facing Notre-Dame de Paris, several evenings a week, a crowd used to stick together. The bookstore, visited in their time by authors James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway, welcomed, “face to face”, visiting Anglo-Saxon writers and others who live in France.
Among the latter, personalities known for their works or for their signature in major American dailies and magazines, such as Thomas Chatterton Williams, essayist and signature of the New York Times Magazine, James McAuley, from Washington Post, or Lauren Collins, from New Yorker. But also teacher-researchers stationed in the Parisian branches of major American universities on the East Coast, artists in residence in cultural centers …
2020 promised to be a year full of passionate debates, at Shakespeare & Co or elsewhere. In this election year in the United States, the small proportion of the American diaspora in France – they would be around 100,000, according to the embassy – which forms an intelligentsia would have slashed on the cancel culture or Bernie Sanders, would have vomited Trump, trembled together in the face of the Republican lifts and would, in the end, have celebrated Joe Biden. Alas, the epidemic has banned gatherings. But she did not remove the links between these Parisians like no other.
Writers, wines and cheese board
Born in Iran, emigrated at the age of 8 to the United States after a journey of exile which she recounts in her book Storytellers (Presses de la Cité), Dina Nayeri has been living in France for a little over a year. Invited by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination to spend a year in the capital, she settled in the 11e district, with a list of priorities: “Find a café, a place to write, a writing group, a few friends who don’t live far away, and a place to do my research. “
“When Hemingway wrote ‘Paris is a party’, he didn’t post every meal he had on Instagram. Today, being American in Paris can easily become a profession in itself. Rachel Donadio, journalist
A friend puts her in touch with Amanda Dennis, a novelist and researcher born in Philadelphia. Nayeri joins a discussion group of English-speaking writers who meet once a week around a few bottles of wine and a cheese platter. At a conference in early October 2019, she met the correspondent of the weekly The Atlantic, Rachel Donadio, who arrived in Paris in 2013 as a culture correspondent for New York Times.
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