Spring 2026
Marie NDiaye, Le bon Denis (2025)
Winter 2025-26
Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Stubborn Archivist (2019)
Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection (2025)
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013) – again, for the Small Talk programme; noted the “eventail de chromatismes sociaux… les mutations menant au mutisme d’un discours travaillé… le repositionnement anachoréographique d’une épaule”.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) – for class – ate oysters and drank sharp, yellow chardonnay after teaching at the end of a bright March week in the buzz of the Esplanade Pajol, moved as ever by Giovanni.
Anne Bourrel, Takoyaki (2024) – after the Paris 8 session
Azad Ashim Sharma, Boiled Owls. Poems (2024) – for the Small Talk programme, and more
Laurent Mauvignier, La Maison vide (2025) – disappointed and bored by the end, by the flat “fatedness” of the women… blah.
Louis Staritzky, Pour une sociologie des tentatives. Faire monde depuis nos vies quotidiennes (2024)
Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)
Marguerite Duras, Le Square (1955)
Clément Willer, Quelque chose de rouge dans la nuit (2025) – sur Duras et le communisme qu’il s’agirait d’abord de ne pas construire.
The Impressions nabies exhibition at the BNF Richelieu
Caroline Dinet, La vie inconnue. Destin et mort d’Athéna Sylve (2025).
Autumn 2025
Sharon Sliwinski, Dreaming in Dark Times. Six Exercises in Political Thought (2017) – for the OK reading group
T.J. Clark, If these apples should fall (2022) – again and it is better still
Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (1947) – again
and when I read back through the ‘avant propos’ with my class, at the end of a sequence of texts and concerns that had taken us from Fautrier’s Ôtages to serial imagery of genocidal violence in Palestine, the sense of his verb ‘poursuivre’ moved for me in ways that I am still registering: ‘Dès les premiers jours cependant, il nous paraissait impossible de combler la distance que nous découvrions entre le langage dont nous disposions et cette expérience que, pour la plupart, nous étions encore en train de poursuivre dans notre corps.’
Paul Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi (2022) – for the OK reading group
Geoff Gilbert and Alex Houen, See you through (2025) – j’adore
Hannah Proctor, Burn Out. The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (2024)
In quick succession: Jean Rhys at the Michael Werner Gallery, London, Edward James’s film Black Atlas at the Warburg, Honda Romance (Vimila Pons) at the Odéon.
Jonathan Buckley, One Boat (2025)
Patricia Williams, The Miracle of the Black Leg, Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (2024) – for the OK reading group
Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020)
Summer 2025
Sharon Kivland, Almenach: A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar (2025)
Terre et liberté, edited by Fatima Ouassek (2025)
Francis Thompson, Crofting Years (1984) – unlikely and memorable
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024)
Ross Barkan, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics (2025)
Toni Morrison, Love (2003)
Louise Erdrich, Shadow Tag (2010)
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence (2021)
Marina Van Zuylen, Eloge des vertus minuscules (2025)
Philippe Forest, Et personne ne sait (2025)
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (1981)