Village Voices

Praise

“Village Voices is a completely unique and cherishable chronicle of a time and a place which—if you were lucky enough to be there—gracefully invited you into the wider world’s literary imagination. Odile Hellier is incomparable.”  —Richard Ford

“In the early 1980s, as if seeking a fresh mission in life, a well travelled French woman, Odile Hellier, decided to open an English-language bookstore in Paris. To her considerable surprise, almost overnight the Village Voice became a Left Bank shrine to Anglo-American thought and letters. In her aptly named memoir, she recalls the extraordinary parade of visiting and ex-pat writers for whom a reading at the bookstore became something of a rite of passage. Her decision to close shop in 2012 is mourned to this day, but in these pages, she vividly recaptures the brilliance, humor and camaraderie that made the cramped space on the rue Princesse so special. Indeed, in Village Voices, Odile Hellier gives scores of writers a fresh chance to be celebrated.” —Alan Riding, author of And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.


“Every chapter of Village Voices is bursting with startling insights and revealing anecdotes. . . . Odile Hellier has given lovers of literary Paris this indispensable evocation of an era. Village Voices is a sumptuous, compulsively readable feast.”
—Jake Lamar, author of Viper’s Dream and Rendezvous Eighteenth

“In her superbly written hybrid book, Odile Hellier… offers a larger, complex understanding of stylistic inventing and social consciousness that a diverse group of major writers and translators contribute to Paris literary life… a crucial literary resource that is also thoroughly entertaining.”
—Jeffrey Greene, author of French Spirits and American Spirituals


“A song, a lyric to literature in all of its myriad forms and to those who live by it and love it. A resounding and rich chorus, truly an opera… that resonates from the first page to the last.”
—Heather Hartley, author of Adult Swim and former Paris Editor at Tin House magazine