In the world of French publishing, it seemed for a time that books only came in tasteful shades of beige and white. Back in those days, my library could be described as a pale, uniform landscape, a white-sand desert. But young, up and coming, upstart publishers have upset the balance, painting their book spines in Technicolor, covering their jackets in florid designs, spattering them with contemporary art. It has taken my library some time to adjust, but as in any desert, a flower and a pop of color are always more than welcome additions. Here are three independent French publishers to check out, for their stunning covers and talented writing by authors old and new.

Aux Forges de Vulcain (since 2010): Collect them all!

The literature collection at Aux Forges de Vulcain is to a reader what baseball cards are to an American sports fan. Each of the eighteen books (and counting) is stamped with a number and coated in its own distinctive color. Together they form a rainbow, featuring authors from France, the United States, England, and India.

As its name suggests, Aux Forges de Vulcain, draws inspiration from the mythological figure of the Vulcan, god of fire and master blacksmith. The house editors believe in well-crafted – or forged – stories and seek to foster a diverse community of readers and writers. Adhering to Aristotle’s dictum, they think that books should be both pleasing and instructive. With such imaginative and ludic titles as Les femmes n’aiment pas les hommes qui boivent (Women Don’t Like Men Who Drink, François Szabowski) and Et je me suis caché (And I Hid, Geoffrey Lachassagne), they surely achieve both.

In addition to their literature collection, Aux Forges de Vulcain publishes essays, art books, and ebooks. 

You can find them on the Web at: www.auxforgesdevulcain.fr

Les Éditions du Sonneur (since 2005): Good enough to eat…

The books in La Petite Collection of the Éditions du Sonneur are bite-size confections worthy of the finest Parisian pâtisserie. These shorts texts – all less than a hundred pages – are glazed in purples, pinks, neon greens, Easter egg blues… While many of the authors featured in this collection are more than famous, the texts themselves have never before been published. The result is a beautiful array of works, from George Sand on human exhibits in Paris, to Émile Zola on death, to Willa Cather on Flaubert’s niece.

Les Éditions du Sonneur works with previously unpublished titles, many of which have been overlooked or forgotten, that deserve to be (re)discovered by the literary community. They value quality over quantity, only developing a few titles a year, and taking care to produce exquisite texts.

The house also publishes full-length novels by contemporary and past authors alike, either foreign (in translation) or French.

You can find them on the Web at: www.editionsdusonneur.com

Les Éditions du Chemin de Fer (since 2005): To hang on your wall.

Les Éditions du Chemin de Fer publishes short texts with illustrations by contemporary artists. Each book cover features a unique work of art – a colorful human form by Frédérique Loutz, a drawing of a gun aspirating an eyeball by Benjamin Monti – at once so daring and appealing you’ll want to have it framed.

The house works with texts by both known and unknown authors, and produces books that have gone out of print as well as brand new works. Recent titles include Le jeune homme qu’on surnommait Bengali (The Young Man We Called Bengali, Louis-René des Forêts) and Vies d’un immortel (Lives of an Immortal Man, Bernard Noël).

You can find them on the Web at: www.chemindefer.org

About the author:

Alexis Pernsteiner is an American writer and translator living in France. Her work has appeared in Words without Borders, Asymptote Journal, and will be published in a forthcoming issue of Zymbol Magazine.

Find her on the Web at: www.pernsteinertranslations.com

collage © Nuage Lepage

CONTENTS

The Accident of Design
Nina Yashar, Milan’s foremost furniture gallerist, in conversation with Dorothée Perret

Natural Mystic, or Rediscovering Caravaggio in LA
Photos by Daniel Trese

Color is a Powerful Tool Which Has Its Own Language
Collages by Anthony Gerace

Love and Let Love
Fashion portfolio by Cédric Rivrain

Monumental Fashion
Rick Owens, Los Angeles-to-Paris transplant, in conversation with Dorothée Perret

Venetian Surfers
Drawings by Paul P.

NOTEBOOK
Touch Me, I’m Sick (excerpts from a novel) by JB Hanak

POSTER
Onaboat 2 by Bea Schlingelhoff

CENTERFOLD
Chanel Spring 2013 Ad Campaign Remix by Pierre-François Letué

The video “Where the streets have no name”— an “improvised” concert on the rooftop of a corner shop of East 7th Street and South Main Street in Los Angeles on 27 March 1987.

photos © Max Reitmeier

Milieu Galerie/Artspace
Münstergasse 6

Opening Hours:
Thursday 5—9 pm & Saturday 11am—4pm
 (or on request)

I’m very happy to announce that PARIS, LA is moving its office to Los Angeles starting with the new year 2013.

See you there!
Dorothée Perret

Photo excerpted from Terry Richardson’s diary 

Photos ©Antoine-Marie Lucciardi for Paris, LA.

A certain number of scenarios reappear cyclically in Denis Savary’s work, such as, for example, tales of erotic longing, domesticity and decapitation. Alma (after Kokoschka), 2008, reproduces the surrogate doll made in 1918 by Oskar Kokoschka to stand in for the love of his life, Alma Mahler, following her marriage to Walter Gropius. Oskar Kokoschka spent a year living with this doll hoping it would console him, going as far as parading her publicly with his friends. After a year, he beheaded the doll at a party and declared his heartache over. In Kunsthalle Bern’s vestibule, all four of Denis Savary’s Almas are gathered as a pack of hairy Amazons on a break.

Or consider Intimités (after Vallotton), 2007, which takes as its starting point an eponymous series of woodcuts by Félix Vallotton. These woodcuts depict scenes of domesticity between Misia Sert and her husband, Thadée Natanson, who was a close friend and early supporter of the Swiss artist as well as the publisher of La revue Blanche. Yearning in silence for years on end for the affection of his patron’s wife, when the time came to break the printing plates, Félix Vallotton kept cutouts of her face. Denis Savary simply reprinted Félix Vallotton’s suite, leaving out the pieces of the image that were actually saved from destruction, thus creating a blank space where the main protagonist’s head should be.

Maldoror, 2012, two gigantic coconut-like creatures made specifically by Denis Savary for his exhibition in Bern. The artist was perusing a Marx Ernst catalog in search of an image of a one-person sauna used to treat syphilitic patients. Instead he found a picture of a coconut-shaped water tank from Africa, which Max Ernst used as a formal reference to paint Eléphant Célèbes, 1921, and which Denis Savary remembered seeing reproduced on the cover of a paperback edition of Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror. The artist bestowed a mythological and slightly anthropomorphic quality to this pair of comical sculptures. “The result stands halfway between a caricatural reminiscence of something that might have been featured in Jean-Hubert Martin’s Les Magiciens de la Terre and the decor of a Tiki Bar,” says the artist.
(KUNSTHALLE BERN PRESS RELEASE)

Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment is John Tottenham‘s second book of poetry, a sequence of mean-spirited love poems, paying particular respect to the institution of marriage, and a meditation on the subjects of regret and resentment. Morbid, bitter, self-pitying… perhaps, but offered in the spirit of giving as a tonic to those who are not blissfully content in love and work, and as a bracing antidote to the disease of unconvincing positivity that seems to infect almost every area of contemporary culture.

For further info on the book click here.