New York Nouveau

Postwar French writers were at the vanguard of global literary innovation—from the experimental minimalism of the Nouveau Roman to the literary games of the OuLiPo—but less often appreciated is the extent to which they worked closely with US editors and translators, published actively with American presses, and often theorized transatlantic connections within their work.

In this exciting new work, Sara Kippur proposes a new French literary history that traces the deep connections between postwar literary experimentalism and the New York publishing industry, compellingly arguing that US-based editors, publishers, producers, professors, and translators crucially intervened to shape French literature. While Kippur attends closely to well-known writers such as Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Georges Perec, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, she also amplifies the voices of those who have been less visible, though no less relevant, including women whose contributions have not received proper credit but who helped to foster a sense of new possibilities for twentieth-century French writing. With these untold histories, stitched together in this book through new archival discoveries from special collections and personal archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Kippur begins to dismantle rigid notions of canonicity, authorship, and national literature.

"Sara Kippur's much awaited New York Nouveau is full of surprises: an Ionesco script for American tv called 'Hard-boiled egg;' a French language textbook by Alain Robbe-Grillet, co-written with Yvonne Lenard at Cal State—her name was promptly erased when Robbe-Grillet reissued Le rendez-vous in Paris as Djinn; Harry Mathews' passionate collaboration with Georges Perec, seen from Ellis Island. New York Nouveau is not only the story of French writers in thrall to American universities and publishing houses, it's a demonstration of what is to be gained from a truly transnational approach to literary history." —Alice Kaplan, Yale University

"This highly original book combines a materialist approach to the social conditions of the circulation of books with close reading. Innovative and compelling, based on rich unknown archival sources, New York Nouveau renews our view of literary history." —Gisèle Sapiro, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales