Two decades after the World Trade Center attacks, the literary show The great bookstore presented by François Busnel settles in New York, to meet “the flower of contemporary New York literature”. This special edition is released September 15 on France 5 at 8:50 p.m..
The program does not dwell on the attacks of September 11, 2001, which devastated the city and upset the state of the world, preferring to make us discover the New York of today through literature and the eyes of those who do it today. “To understand New York, you have to read its writers”, François Busnel tells us.
That week @GrandeLibrairie put down his suitcases in New York!
François Busnel takes you to meet Patti Smith, Nicole Krauss, James McBride, @wmboyle4, @PettyKate and Benoit Cohen!
See you Wednesday September 15 at 8:55 p.m. on @ France5tv #LGLf5 pic.twitter.com/U1qmv4gRZy– La Grande Librairie (@GrandeLibrairie) September 13, 2021
On board an emblematic yellow taxi, driven by a rather unusual driver (the French director and writer Benoît Cohen, adopted New Yorker, author of Yellow Cab), François Busnel walks us through the neighborhoods of New York “away from tourist circuits”, with a handful of writers linked in one way or another to “The Big Apple” as their guides.
In Greenwich Village, we discover in the footsteps of the musician and writer Patti Smith, the cult recording studio Electronic Lady, created by Jimmy Hendrix, where the author of Just Kids (Denoël, 2010) recorded his first single. She confides there her love of books and reading, since childhood, and her passion for Rimbaud.
Then direction Brooklyn with the young writer Kate Read Perry. “The best place”, breathes the young author. It was here, in cafes, that she wrote part of her last book, True Story, which features a young woman victim of sexual assault and explores the culture of rape in American high schools. A novel published in France in this literary season at Gallmeister.
“What I love about New York is the speed, the movement and the way everyone lives together (…) Everything is synchronized, people live in harmony in this very compact city. I find it very invigorating. , I find it beautiful. And then there are so many bookstores! “, underlines this young committed writer, for whom the novels are “useful to society, (…) a space for reflection to imagine a new way of living”.
The visit continues on the Upper East Side with Benoit Cohen, and his latest novel, The price of paradise (Flammarion), a book that features two female characters at both ends of the social ladder. “New York is no longer a dangerous city, like in the 1980s”, he says, “but it is a city where one feels the despair”. He says how he could perceive in his taxi “the gap between those who have everything and those who have nothing”. Sitting on a bench in Central Park, Benoit Cohen also delivers some secrets and anecdotes about this lung of the city …
In this special edition we also meet the novelist Nicole Krauss, the author of Be a man (Éditions de L’Olivier) found in the Parc Slope district, which is also where Paul Auster lives, then James Mc Bride (Deacon King Kong, Gallmeister editions), winner of the National Book Award, in the popular district of Red Hook. The visit ends in the “bobo” district of Gravesend with William Boyle (The City of the Margins, Gallmeister Publishing).
The Great Bookstore, Wednesday at 9:50 p.m.
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