For the next 10 days I’ll be taking part in Les Belles Étrangères, a festival hosted by the Centre National du Livre in France. This year they are hosting 12 American writers whose work has recently been translated into French and putting us on tour across the country: Charles D’Ambrosio, Percival Everett, Forrest Gander, Andrew Sean Greer, John Haskell, Matt Madden, Jack O’Connell, Eleni Sikelianos, Yuri Slezkine, Richard White, Colson Whitehead and me. Go here to see the list of events, and follow @agreer/belles-etrangeres on twitter to hear what happens over the festival. I’ll be posting daily, along with Colson Whitehead, Matt Madden, Andrew Sean Greer and John Haskell. In the meantime, I wanted to share this shot of the fountain at Place de la Concorde, which I walked past this morning, after landing in Paris around 6 am, the whole trip already seeming like some kind of dream. For you fellow musical-lovers, this is the spot where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance in American in Paris. I was having flashbacks all day–quite a beautiful moment in Vincente Minnelli history. See below for the full effect.
Hannah Tinti is the author of the
short story collection Animal
Crackers and co-founder and
editor in chief of One Story
magazine. Her best-selling novel,
The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of
the Quality Paperback Bookclub
New Voices Award, winner of the
John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize,
and a recipient of the American
Library Association's Alex Award.
