It’s no secret that writers find Paris inspiring (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce would agree). And now, with the advent of the Paris Writers News Short Story Contest, City of Light-inspired tales are ready to be recognized. Want to know more? Organizer Laurel Zuckerman answers a few questions:

Who can enter?
Anyone who has written a story with some connection to Paris may submit. Stories must be in English, but writers can be of any age or nationality and live anywhere in the world. All lengths, from short-short up to 5,000 words are eligible.

What kind of stories are you looking for?
I personally am hoping for beautifully written stories full of energy, humor and heart. Stories with depth that are fun to read. This said, the final decision is the judge’s alone.

Who selects the stories to be published?
The Editorial Committee evaluates submissions and selects the short list. Short-listed stories are then grouped by theme and sent to one of our twelve Judges. Each Judge will choose one story to appear in The Best and Most Delightful Stories About Paris.

We hope that this two-step process will ensure high quality while allowing for original, exciting, and ultimately personal choices by our distinguished judges.

Who are the twelve Judges?
Nicola Keegan, Janet Skeslien Charles, Elizabeth Bard, Charles Trueheart, Brian Spence, Charles and Clydette De Groot, Cara Black, Anne Korkeakivi, Heather Stimmler Hall, Penelope Fletcher, Robert Stewart, and Diane Johnson. Each of these award-winning writers, editors, bookstore owners and Paris literary figures will be responsible for choosing one story for publication–and telling what they liked about it. For more on the Judges and Editorial Committee members, please see the Paris Writers News website.

In addition to publication, there is a 200 Euro prize. How is this attributed?
The Editorial Committee will award the 200 euro prize to the story receiving the highest evaluations overall.

Doesn’t that make thirteen stories to be published?
Yes.

Why is there an entry fee?
Our original idea was no entry fee, but with the ease of email transmissions, there was a real risk of being inundated with submissions. We really want writers to send us their best stories. Another factor was the cost of producing and distributing a high quality book, and frankly, every little bit helps. We are actively seeking sponsors in the Anglophone community.

Will the book be available for purchase?
Yes! The Best and Most Delightful Stories About Paris will be available in paperback and on all e-book readers, in Fall 2011.  We will be launching a contest for the design of the cover in the next few months.

Where can we learn more about the contest?
For now, The Paris Writers News website. A dedicated website will be announced soon.

PARIS WRITERS NEWS SHORT STORY CONTEST
Genre: Short fiction (story must have some link to Paris)
Closing date: 30 November 2010
Prize: 200 euros for first prize, plus publication of twelve best stories
Entry fee: 10 euros
Restrictions: Maximum 5,000 words. Submission in the body of the email only.
Further information: 12 stories will be selected to appear in the book: “BEST AND MOST DELIGHTFUL STORIES ABOUT PARIS” to be published fall 2011

Are libraries the new cultural zeitgeist? A post on NPR’s blog, entitled “Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries” argues yes. As self-proclaimed geeks and nerds, we admit we chuckled a few times while reading it. It inspired our own top three list:

Top reasons why the ALP might take over macarons

1. The American Library in Paris  is open on Sundays and most fancy patisseries are not.

2. Books are less caloric than cookies.

3. We’re a better bargain — a year’s individual membership at the ALP is less expensive than two boxes of assorted macarons from Pierre Hermé.

We blushed when we read this delightful blog post from writer Eric Heywood about the American Library in Paris, which appears today at Forbes.com.

For those curious about what’s on the bookshelves of the Library’s fearless Director, check out Heywood’s personal blog for an interview with Charlie Trueheart about the book that appears on the fifth shelf of his bookcase, five books in.

Many thanks to Eric Heywood for featuring the Library in such a lovely and thoughtful manner!

Harper Lee’s classic turns 50 this month, with much fanfare from publisher HarperCollins, who have created a special anniversary website to celebrate. The book — Harper Lee’s first and only novel — has been translated into over 40 languages, was voted by librarians as one of the best books of the 20th century, and sells over 750,000 copies a year.

To Kill a Mockingbird continues to inspire debate, most recently in a piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, who argued that the character of Atticus Finch is  “looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds,” an approach that “is about accommodation, not reform.”

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, columnist Kathleen Parker defended To Kill a Mockingbird, saying, “trying to kill a great book because a 50-year-old literary character doesn’t measure up to modern critics’ idea of heroism is a sin.”

Apologist or revolutionary? You can judge for yourself how the book has stood the test of time. The Library has three copies in its collection, all of which are currently available. Do you remember the first time you read it?

UPDATE: If you’re interested in comparing the film and book versions, please join us as we welcome Judith Merians for a talk on adapting “To Kill a Mockingbird” to film, on Tuesday, 28 September, 19h30 at the Library.

Today’s guest blogger, Allan Massie, will be speaking at the Library on Wednesday, 30 June at 19h30.

More years ago than I care to think I was having breakfast one morning in a café in Cambridge. It was a Friday; so I was reading The Spectator. There was a review by that distinguished historian of France and the USA, D W Brogan, of a new book about Vichy. “It was difficult,”  he wrote, “for us in 1940 to see that there was a case for Vichy; there was even a case for Laval.”

That sentence startled me. Last most of my generation in Britain, I had been reared in the belief that the French had let us down in 1940, that Vichy was contemptible, Marshal Petain a vain old dotard, and Laval a twister and Quisling. It had never occurred to me that many French people believed that the British had abandoned the Battle of France before it was truly lost, that many honourable men had served Vichy believing that this was in the best interests of France, and that the aged Marshal and Laval were both in their way French patriots.

I date my fascination with these dark years of French history from the day I read that review, but it was almost thirty years later (1989) that I published a novel, “A Question of Loyalties”, which explores the complications and moral dilemmas of wartime France, my narrator’s father being a good and honourable man who becomes a junior minister in the Vichy Government. That novel won prizes in Britain, but it was not translated into French for many years. As it happened, my friend , that very good novelist Piers Paul Read, also published a novel, “The Free Frenchman”, the same year. His hero was a Gaullist and his book was immediately translated. I could not avoid the thought that its political stance was more acceptable. Eventually my admirable publisher, Bernard de Fallois (Editions de Fallois), brought out my novel in 2004, with the title “L’Honneur d’un homme”, in an excellent translation by Jean Bourdier.

The subject would not leave me however, and I began collecting material for a non-fiction book on the continuing influence of Vichy and the wartime years on French public life. This will be published, as “The Spectre of Vichy”, by Jonathan Cape sometime next year.
Meanwhile I had long wanted to write a crime novel, partly because of the pleasure I have got from crime fiction, and especially the novels of Simenon, partly because I agree with that fine novelist Nicolas Freeling who insisted that “in prose fiction, crime is the pre-eminent and often predominant theme. Where better, I thought , than wartime France to set my story?

I had visited Bordeaux for a book event publicising another of my novels, “Les Ombres de l’Empire” and in the few days I spent there was struck by the haunting but elusive character of the city, this doubtless enhanced by my memories of the novels of Francois Mauriac. It seemed a good setting for my crime novel, all the more so because in 1940 it became part of the Occupied Zone and my hero, a senior policeman, would have to deal with the German authorities as well as his own superiors.

“Death in Bordeaux” breaks some of the conventions of crime fiction. To this extent it may be unsatisfactory as a pure roman policier, even while, being also that, it may be unsatisfactory as a straight novel. If I don’t think so myself, this may in part be attributed to a natural protective attitude to my own work. More seriously however I have long thought that the barriers separating what is called “genre fiction” from the literary novel are out-of-date, and should be demolished.

Anyway, whether it works as crime novel or straight novel, or as both or neither, is for readers to decide. Meanwhile I am happily at work on the second book in the trilogy which will take Superintendent Lannes through the darkest years of the war and the epuration  (purge) of suspected collaborators after the Liberation.

–Allan Massie

“The pheromone that attracts female mice to the odour of a particular male has been identified. Named ‘darcin’ by researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology (after Darcy, the attractive hero in Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice”), this unusual protein in a male’s urine attracts females and is responsible for learned preference for specific males.” Read more about this breakthrough in Science Daily.

Today’s guest blogger, screenwriter Diane Lake, will be speaking on the art of writing for the silver screen at the Library on Wednesday 23 June at 19h30.

“You’re a WHAT?!”

When you tell someone you’re a screenwriter, they often don’t know exactly what that is. Some people assume that means you write the storyline of a film but the director does everything else. Some people assume you write the dialogue but the director does everything else. I’ve even run into people who think the actors make up their own dialogue after the screenwriter ‘sets the scene’ or something.

Ernest Lehman, screenwriter of films like Sabrina and The Sound of Music liked to tell the story of his experience writing North by Northwest when this question of what a screenwriter does came up. In that film there’s a famous scene—the crop dusting scene—where Cary Grant, left in the middle of the barren Illinois countryside, is pursued by a small plane. Grant dodges the plane and the lethal gas it’s putting out by running into the nearby cornfields and hiding. He’s eventually able to outsmart the plane and cause its demise. This series of scenes was hailed as brilliant by several critics and Hitchcook’s ‘masterful’ direction was again and again touted as ‘genius’ for the tight way those scenes were shot.

Lehman, who loved working with Hitchcock and begrudged him none of his praise for being such a fine director on the film, was clearly miffed, though, that all the credit for the success of that scene always went to Hitchcock. “It’s all there, in the script,” Lehman said to an audience at the Writer’s Guild of America one night not too many years ago. “Every turn Grant made, every shot—it’s all in the script.”

Generally speaking, it’s usually all in the script. While a director certainly does more than point the camera and say action, the entire scene that an audience sees on the screen was meticulously created by the screenwriter—word for word, action for action.

If film is the art form of our time, why is it we don’t know the people who create that art form? Everyone can name their favorite novelists—how many people can name their favorite screenwriters? While most people know their favorite directors how many people even know the names of the screenwriters who created their favorite films?

When I was moving houses in Los Angeles a few years ago, I was purging everything. As a writer, my life is full of paper and I decided it was ridiculous to keep carting around all the versions of scripts I had written for various studios that never got made. I have file cabinets full of not just the scripts themselves but all the research that went into writing those scripts. But as I was about to dump much of this material a friend of mine who’s a film archivist for Warner Brothers said I couldn’t. He said that all that material would be of great import if the film ever got made, that film scholars would want it preserved and it was my responsibility to hold onto that material. He was so passionate on the subject he made me feel like the keeper of the flame or something.

But the more I think about it, the more I think he may be right. At some point in the future, those who study film will want to know where the ideas for the film came from and how it was constructed. That’s when people will begin to wonder, “Hey, who wrote that anyway?”

–Diane Lake

The weird stationery of Mussolini, Ian Fleming, Charles Atlas, Dr. Seuss, Marlene Dietrich, and more … all collected by Letterheady.  According to the rubric, “Letterheady is an online homage to offline correspondence; specifically letters. However, here at Letterheady we don’t care about the letter’s content. Just its design.”

One of the most admirable and inventive and current library blogs around comes from the Seattle Public Library. Its Shelf Talk blog is a trove of ideas and informaiton that keeps coming and sets an example for library blogs everywhere. Recent trolling by our own tireless remote researcher, Andrea Delumeau, turned up some excellent summer reading tips for tweens, a nice item on Shakespeare authenticity questions, news of a new service for downloading audio books onto MP3 players at the Seattle Public Library (we’ll work on it), and a piece on book titles that overreach. Check the links above or go to the main Shelf Talk site.

Andrea Delumeau, by the way, bookmarks everything she finds here and Browser can barely keep up with it. Have a look.

Today’s guest blogger, Keri Walsh, is the editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, a collection of the Shakespeare & Co. doyenne’s correspondence. She’ll be speaking about the book at the Library on Wednesday, June 16 at 19h30.

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was the owner of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).  She grew up Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and after spending the First World War as a volunteer agricultural worker in France and a member of the Red Cross staff in Belgrade, she came to Paris to found her legendary bookstore.   At the center of Parisian literary modernism, Beach developed relationships with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Richard Wright, among many others, and left us with a rich trove of correspondence.

One of these letters, written in 1940 to French bookstore-owner Adrienne Monnier, shows Beach championing American writers to French readers.  One such writer was T.S. Eliot, whom she called “the most fascinating and interesting personality at the present moment,” and whose works, we might be surprised to learn, were not at this point widely available in French translation.  “Want something new?” she asks an imaginary patron of her bookshop, “Fresh arrival” the “Nonsense” poems of T.S. Eliot and his “Practical Cats.  All these cats have a name by which they’re known, a name that they only know, but they never confess, this name.”  Of course, Beach was referring to Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, published in 1939 with an illustration by Eliot himself on the cover.  Beach never would have guessed that four decades later, Andrew Lloyd Webber would immortalize Eliot’s feline protagonists in one of the longest-running musicals of all time.  Together, Beach and Monnier translated Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” When it was published in Monnier’s literary journal Le Navire d’Argent, it was the first of Eliot’s major works to appear in French.

Reflecting on Eliot’s importance at the beginning of the Second World War, Beach wrote “Why, oh why not translate absolutely all the prose of T.S. Eliot?” Beach’s supportive relationships with the major figures of modernism were often mutual.  When her business was threatened by the economic crises of the 1930s, Eliot came to Paris and gave a fund-raising reading at Shakespeare and Company, helping Beach to keep her hub of literary life afloat.

–Keri Walsh