French Press
Essays, reviews of recent books & special series
Essay·by Olivier Sebban·November 2, 2026
This novel was born of a sense of unease at the deteriorating state of our country, as well as of a melancholy brought on by the consequences of the profound political, cultural, and moral crisis we are going through.
Essay·by Doyle D. Calhoun·October 17, 2026
Accusations of AI use in light of a (long) literary history
Essay·by Benjamin Hoffmann·July 3, 2026
Sketch of the Poetics of a Form Yet to Be Born: A Fiction That Produces Knowledge About the World by Rigorously Articulating Novelistic Invention and Documented Facts
Essay·by Philippe Vilain·April 19, 2026
Eight Remarks on a Milieu in Search of Its Conscience
Review·by Estelle Normand·October 30, 2026
Lucie Bérard's debut novel follows Paula, adrift by the sea between memories and chemical blondness: a complex heroine with a caustic eye.
Review·by Estelle Normand·October 29, 2026
A striking and necessary autobiographical debut novel about a woman who survived sexual violence and incest: an urgent read.
Review·by Estelle Normand·October 28, 2026
In language as punchy as it is visceral, the author takes apart the alienating, crushing machinery of the factory: its violence, its absurdity, and the inhumanity of its working conditions and its bosses.
Review·by Benjamin Hoffmann·October 26, 2026
An alternate history written in dialogue with artificial intelligence: what if Rome had invented the steam engine? A fascinating experiment that above all reveals how conservative the machines’ imagination is.
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 25, 2026
Standing before Monet's Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Marie-Hélène Lafon writes a short, 23-page text, sensual and poetic.
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 20, 2026
In L'Éléphant, Patrick Modiano fits a whole life into a short text, haunted by passing time and what is gone.
Review·by Benjamin Hoffmann·October 17, 2026
Why did John Coltrane's 1966 tour of Japan move its audiences so deeply? Jérôme Schmidt follows this mystery from Hokkaidō to the volcanoes of Kyushu.
News·October 16, 2026
The jury of the 2026 French Press Prize awarded its prize to Sylvie Kandé and a special mention to Laurence Plazenet, for their literary projects as part of the Jules Verne Creative Writing Residency in the Midwest.
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 16, 2026
Christine Angot traces the genealogy of the men, and above all the women, of her family: beneath the rules for passing on a surname lie immeasurable acts of violence. A devastating book.
News·October 13, 2026
Doyle Calhoun, a professor at the University of Cambridge, speaks out in The New York Times about the Thélyson Orélien affair.
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 12, 2026
Epidemics rage, animals are banned, hygienism reigns. Guillaume Nail’s second novel, a prophetic fable and a genuine jolt, gives love no chance at all.
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 8, 2026
Damien returns to Arles to place his father in a nursing home and meets Saïd, a Syrian refugee. A sensitive, erudite novel: a geography of desire, passionate love, and grief.
News·October 8, 2026
A reflection on what it means to write in the age of artificial intelligence, as an era of widespread suspicion threatens to degenerate into an age of surveillance.
Review·by Benjamin Hoffmann·October 7, 2026
It all begins with the death of a cat, after eighteen years of shared life. What becomes of grief when we don’t dare give it its rightful place?
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 7, 2026
Robin Josserand
Robin Josserand traces the genealogy of an original wound: the story of Mireille and Gaston, two great Resistance fighters destroyed by their deportations. A bittersweet experience.
News·October 7, 2026
Le Monde looks back at eight op-eds published since the start of the Thélyson Orélien affair. What is a writer in the age of AI?
Review·by Nicolas Becard·October 5, 2026
Both a human dystopia and an ecological fable, Le livre de Sève follows the epic journey of Sève, born in the heart of the Ronciers. A singular, intelligent novel.
News·September 26, 2026
A monumental precedent for thinking about the relationship between artificial intelligence and literary creation. French Press announces an op-ed in a major daily newspaper.
Review·by Estelle Normand·September 16, 2026
Somewhere between memoir, essay, and the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Jeanette Winterson has written a dense, gripping book on the liberating power of literature.
Review·by Estelle Normand·July 26, 2026
A story of rare intensity about love, illness and grief, an uncompromising laying bare: a moving text, difficult but necessary.
Review·by Estelle Normand·July 1, 2026
Through three women, a brilliant and necessary novel about the Sámi people, whose lands and villages are swallowed up in the name of progress.
Review·by Benjamin Hoffmann·April 5, 2026
A choral novel set over a single day in Chicago, following a class of master’s students in stand-up comedy: a fresh reflection on artistic creation in the age of social media.
In the summer of 2026, French Press invited French-language writers to reflect on artificial intelligence, starting from a very simple question: is there an ethical and legitimate use of artificial intelligence in literary creation? Their varied, well-argued, previously unpublished answers are collected in this special series.
Read the introduction to the series →
Essay·by Laure Gouraige·June 15, 2026
While reflecting on the ethical use of artificial intelligence, another question kept coming back to me, obsessively. Allow me this step aside: on what terms can one still call oneself a writer?
Essay·by Olivier Sebban·June 18, 2026
In the series “A Summer with AI,” Olivier Sebban says what artificial intelligence does to literature, in a short video he chose to title “AI: Disembodied Literature.”
Essay·by Patrick Bray·June 25, 2026
Critics of artificial intelligence have chosen the wrong target. A written or spoken text is, by its very nature, artificial. Language belongs not to biology, or even to the individual, but to culture: it is constructed, collective, and artificial. Language does not belong to us. Yet in writing literature, we manage to do a certain violence to language, tearing it from its context, which then allows the creation of a new object, artificial in its turn. But literary artifice admits itself as such, by revealing the artifice of every utterance.
Essay·by David Rochefort·June 29, 2026
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this: put two phones side by side, each running an AI app in voice mode. The first will ask something like, “Hi, how are you, how can I help you today?” The second will answer, in the same cheerful, reassuring voice: “Great, I’m doing well! Do you need any help?”
Essay·by Bertrand Misonne·July 6, 2026
Is there a legitimate use of Artificial Intelligence in literature? Answering that question means compressing a profusion of thoughts on art and culture into a simple “yes” or “no.” It’s like taking a patch of Amazon rainforest and making a sturdy sheet of plywood out of it.
Essay·by Ève Guerra·July 13, 2026
Writing with AI means losing the very sensuality of the act of writing.
Essay·by Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville·July 21, 2026
Artificial intelligence is an extraordinary grocery store. It can shelve a thought into aisles, bring out its logic, find the references, mark out a line of reasoning. It excels at what we might call the receivable: what has already been formulated, recognized, handed down, sometimes by the greatest minds. It gives us back the world’s library in an instantly available form. In that sense, it is not the enemy of the humanities. It may even offer them unprecedented power of dissemination and comparison.
Essay·by Pia Petersen·July 27, 2026
I love technology, and I write my novels by hand. When I sit down and start writing, I breathe, I think, I feel the world and other people, I exist, I live. Something indefinable happens when I pick up my pen and begin. Victor admits it: he has never held a pen, never leaned over a blank page to let his imagination run. He is not human.
