Interview of Jean-Christophe Harel, Cultural Attache at the French Consulate in Los Angeles

Learn more about the literary festival Vis-à-Vis which will take place on Habbot Kinney in Venice, Ca, May 15.

Interview of Jean-Christophe Harel, Cultural Attache at the French Consulate in Los Angeles.

A few logistics points

Do come early to get a sit, as this is a non rsvp - free event.

We strongly encourage alternative transport: Walk, Bike, Blue Bus #2 or Metro #33 or #333.

However, we also have free, on-site parking for the last session @ Electric Lodge from 3pm, 1416 Electric Ave., Venice, CA 90291.

We hope you will come numerous, see you on Saturday!


Agrandir le plan

Workshops dedicated to children literature.

Vis-à-Vis, a day with French and American writers... and kids!

The festival has put in place workshops dedicated to childrens:

10:30am - 1:00pm
Workshops for kids
Ecole Claire Fontaine - 226 Westminster Ave., Venice, CA.

1:30pm - 6:00pm
Literary workshops for kids with the Alliance Française de Los Angeles
Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library - 501 S. Venice Blvd., Venice, CA.

Vis-à-vis: a festival supporting green incentives

Joining us for Vis-à-Vis, you will have the opportunity to discover in beautiful Venice, two venues interested in supporting the "Green Revolution" and dealing with environmental issues.

The Electric Lodge is a laboratory for artists and environmentalists, a torch bearer in the effort to stimulate public understanding and support for the creation of a sustainable worldwide eco-system. Through our Arts Earth Partnership and other programs it becomes a nexus for a network of environmentally friendly cultural facilities, performing arts companies and individual artists in Los Angeles and across the country, uniquely manifesting our identity as the place where artistic and environmental ideas are presented and explored.

Other venue, same interests, The G2 Gallery believes in the union between environmental causes and the power of photographic art to change the world. It shares this passion with the world’s best photographers, who use their camera as a tool to inspire conservation. The gallery donates all proceeds from art sales to environmental causes.

Another reason to join us on May 15th...
Download the full program here

The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, by Norman Klein

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an 'anti-tour' of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb.

"Klein clearly follows in Mike Davis's wake, but develops a distinctive focus on the erasure of memory in and about the city." Times Literary Supplement

"Klein is a fine stylist, an engaging historian – his account of the way noir shaped the city is strikingly fresh." New Scientist

"Norman Klein is full of ideas, brilliantly and beautifully expressed". Journal of Americann History

Unforgivable, by Philippe Djian

Djian’s spare and eloquent literary novel, translated smoothly from the French by Cameron, won the 2009 Prix Jean Freustié and is currently being filmed by French director André Téchiné . In just over 250 pages, Djian manages not only to draw a fascinating portrait of the main character, author Francis, but also to sketch his family members, including his current wife; his daughter, an actress and addict, and her banker husband; and their silent twin daughters. All are caught in the backlash of a family in conflict. Djian chronicles Francis’ breakdown after his daughter disappears and the effects that the tragedy has on the entire family. Powerful and moving, Djian’s story is both a thriller and a psychological study; the narrative moves back and forth in time as the current tragedy reminds Francis of the deaths of his first wife and elder daughter. Suggest to readers who enjoy spare literary novels that reveal depth of character while unfolding a compelling plot. --Jessica Moyer

“A long journey of doubt, of obsession, and, above all, of setbacks and blows. Economic prose . . . and very sharp. Djian's language rings true.” Métro

“Djian has the genius to succeed in two genres at once, the genre of the intimate diary . . . and the ?sea, sex, and sun' genre, stormy at times. He writes panoramically, wide-screen, the seaside under a telescope, Californian sky, the angle of the camera well-chosen between the lawn and the garden path . . . Unforgivable is the account of a misanthropic charmer . . . you won't be bored for a second.” Le Point

“Djian, here at the height of his talent, is capable of giving life to the sixty-year-old Francis, at once violently egocentric and infantile, engaging and unreasonable . . . a profoundly thoughtful novel . . . the minute examination of parent-child relations, the theme of forgiveness and of mercy, are only at the surface of a much larger aesthetic and ethical ambition: to detail the craft of life and love . . . remarkably well done.” Télérama

“Philippe Djian [delivers] a beautiful exercise of self-deprecating humor . . . Various reflections [on] paternity, on writing, on relationship erosion, and on aging, [Unforgivable] treats serious subjects . . . with seriousness but without taking itself too seriously.” L'Express

“Philippe Djian has no equal, amongst French authors, as the interrogator of the relationships that bind human beings together . . . it is this humanity—tackled head-on in all its complexity—that draws him close to the great Anglo-Saxon writers. Djian is incontestably the most American of French writers.” Vogue (France)

“[Djian's] imagination has rarely been as fertile . . . a reflection on the way literature ingests the whole life of an author. That, for Djian, is surely true.” Livres Hebdo

“[Unforgivable] is a vertiginous fall . . . [using] flashbacks, a host of dilapidated secondary characters, country roads, and stylistic brainwaves . . . Unforgivable resembles its author: a dark and disquieting gaze, strong nerves . . . and an irresistible charm.” Elle

“[Unforgivable] is impossible to put down.” Libération

This Wicked World, by Richard Lange

Set in L.A., Lange's visceral, hard-hitting first novel puts him squarely in the ring with the best young neo-noir writers. Jimmy Boone, a former Marine and ex-con lying low and waiting out his probation by tending bar on Hollywood Boulevard, gets drawn back onto dangerous ground after he agrees to help his bouncer buddy, Robo, look into the death of a young Guatemalan immigrant found covered in infected dog bites on an MTA bus. Boone and Robo get on a trail that leads from a ghetto dope pad, where they rescue an abused and toothless fighting dog, to a secluded desert compound near Twentynine Palms, where a psychotic crime boss, Taggert, hosts bloody dog-fighting contests. Boone soon finds himself in way over his head as he comes up against Taggert's crew of degenerates. While the book contains some familiar set pieces, Lange, the author of the story collection Dead Boys, shows he has the potential to put his own distinctive mark on the mythology of Los Angeles. (June)
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"Anyone left who's keen on noirish flicks like Heat or Chinatown, or finds kindred spirits in Thomas McGuane, Denis Johnson, or Charles Bukowski, will find comrades among these dead men." Rocky Mountain News, Clayton Moore

"Ex-con tries to keep straight in this hard-boiled first novel....Compelling characters. Even the minor players are fully-formed, and Lange manages to depict a little bit of L.A. with each one....Smartly entertaining noir." Kirkus Reviews

"It's violent, it's truthful, and it's devastating." New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio

"Lange draws indelible characters and writes deadeye dialogue, and his L.A. is as parched and pitiless as the desert that surrounds it....This Wicked World is wickedly good-and we have a feeling that Lange is just getting started." Booklist Keir Graff

"Lange is incapable of creating a character that isn't memorable. Even the most minor are indelibly sketched....Lange has a knack for miniature Southern California tableaux, those things that we notice out of the corner of our eyes....The zone where literary fiction meets genre fiction is a crowded borderland these days. With This Wicked World, Lange proves himself comfortable on both sides of the line." Los Angeles Times, Antoine Wilson

"Memorable....Richard Lange's first book set the bar so high that his sophomore effort had almost no chance of living up to the hype-except that it does, an L.A. Confidential for the 21^st Century....It's a sharp, literary crime novel with the kind of lean and sparse prose that writers like Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark honed to a razor's edge. It's also a worthy entry in the proud tradition of Los Angeles noir novels started by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler....A lot of writers try to write like this, but Lange just does it and he makes it work ." Daily BeastDavid, J. Montgomery

"Set in L.A., Lange's visceral, hard-hitting first novel puts him squarely in the ring with the best young neo-noir writers....Lange, the author of the story collection Dead Boys, shows he has the potential to put his own distinctive mark on the mythology of Los Angeles." Publishers Weekly

"Stylistically brilliant, painfully and truly observed and rendered, Dead Boys is not just one of the best collections thus far this decade: Dead Boys is one of the best short story collections of the past fifty years, right up there with Barry Hannah's Airships, Chris Offutt's Kentucky Straight, James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man, and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find." San Francisco Chronicle Eric Williamson

"The best debut collection we have read all year....You could shelve Lange between Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Richard Yates, and no fights would break out...Lange writes with tremendous heart." E! Online, Tod Goldberg

Join us on May 15th in Venice, CA for Vis-à-Vis

Three readings with ten prominent contemporary French/Francophone and American writers, workshops for kids to discover French and literature all day long. Vis-à-vis is free and open to the public. Discover the full schedule:

11am - 12:30pm
Philippe Djian / Steve Erickson / Norman Klein
"The novel Vs. cinema and television"
Consortium Gallery - 1100 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, CA

2:30pm - 4:00pm
James Frey / Richard Lange / Jean Rolin
"Writing on the city, writing on the margins"
G2 Gallery - 1503 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, CA

4:30pm - 6:00pm
Alain Mabanckou / Véronique Ovaldé / Boualem Sansal / Danzy Senna
"Writing: a quest for identity?"
Electric Lodge - 1416 Electric Ave., Venice, CA

6:00pm Cocktail @ Electric Lodge


FOR THE KIDS

10:30am - 1:00pm
Workshops for kids
Ecole Claire Fontaine - 226 Westminster Ave., Venice, CA

1:30pm - 6:00pm
Literary Workshops for kids with the Alliance Française de Los Angeles
Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library - 501 S. Venice Blvd., Venice, CA

Download the full schedule & map by clicking here