In recent years, many booksellers have become valuable allies in promoting Quebec literature in France.
Posted at 7:00 am.
Aurélie Garreau and Juliette Pelletier were both part of a delegation of French booksellers invited by Québec Édition in 2019 as part of its program to facilitate meetings with Quebec publishers in Montreal.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Part of the Quebec literature department at the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg
After returning from this trip, Juliette Pelletier, a bookseller on the Quai des Brumes in Strasbourg, felt the need to set up a section for Quebec literature. “It was unthinkable for me not to have a specific department,” she remembers, connected via video conference in France. I discovered something that has been very beneficial to me as a reader; I wanted to share it with everyone and the readers really liked it. »
Meetings in bookstores with Quebec writers, which began with Juliana Léveillé-Trudel for her novel Nirliit, multiplied in the bookstore in Strasbourg. When Éditions du Sous-Sol published Mordecai Richler’s work, it invited his translators Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné; Then Paul Kawczak introduced Ténèbre – a book that was a big hit in the bookstore on Quai des Brumes, she notes.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Exhibition of Mémoire d’encrier books shortly before the poetic encounter with Rodney Saint-Éloi at the beginning of October at the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg
Since then there have been numerous guests from Quebec: Virginia Pésémapeo Bordeleau, Vanessa Bell, Chris Bergeron, Catherine Leroux, Alain Farah, Kevin Lambert, Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba, Dominique Scali, Marie-Hélène Voyer… At the beginning of October it is The Writer, Editor and founder of Mémoire d’encrier, Rodney Saint-Éloi, was passing through for a poetry evening – the ideal opportunity to rediscover a genre with the house’s catalogue, which included La Peuplade L’Oie de Cravan and Éditions du Passage , which she had neglected since her school days.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY LE MONTE-EN-L’AIR BOOKSHOP
The Rapailler Festival at Le Monte-en-l’air bookstore in Paris in June 2022
In parallel with all these events, the bookseller planned Le Québec à Quai on the sidelines of the Rapailler Festival of Quebec Literature, which was launched by her Parisian colleague Aurélie Garreau of the bookstore Le Monte-en-l’air (and which finally took place in the year 2022).
Booksellers are important smugglers. If you have a bookstore in the neighborhood that you like to go to and trust, then that makes all the difference when the booksellers promote a particular literature by organizing a presentation or talking about their favorite literature for a Quebec author.
Élodie Comtois, President of the Québec Édition
Among many other initiatives, Élodie Comtois mentions the bookseller Hélène Woodhouse of La Chouette Librairie de Lille, who this year invited authors from Quebec as part of the Festival des livres d’en Haut. “In February there was a Quebec month at the Pantagruel bookstore in Marseille. The bookstore chain Initiales has released a special edition of its magazine “Focus Québec”. All this awakens curiosity about Quebec literature,” says the president of the Québec Édition.
Quebec writers were invited to the Quai des Brumes bookstore
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Bookseller Juliette Pelletier meets Kevin Lambert at the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg in September 2022
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Catherine Leroux in the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Alain Farah in the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE QUAI DES BRUMES BOOKSHOP
Marie-Hélène Voyer in the Quai des Brumes bookstore in Strasbourg
1/4
Parisian bookseller Aurélie Garreau recalls that one of the goals of the Rapailler festival was to show that novelistic and poetic production in Quebec is “rich and heterogeneous.” “In this literary season, several books from Quebec are real discoveries for me,” she notes.
Among her recent favorites: The Version Nobody Cares about, by Emmanuelle Pierrot (Le Quartanier), “a magnificent, utterly addictive feminist road trip between Virginie Despentes and Jack London”; Let Our Joy Remain, by Kevin Lambert (Le Nouvel Attila), “a great political novel with lush language”; or The Report is Good, by Louis-Daniel Godin (La Peuplade), a “touching, funny, imaginative” novel, in her opinion.
“It gives me great pleasure to defend it like any book in French literature,” concludes the Parisian bookseller.