Co-presented with Bookforum and French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), as part of Write About Now

 

Literature and art have always relied on quotes, borrowings, and outright embezzlements. How are these practices meaningful? Can a story be owned?

 

Yannick Haenel’s book Jan Karski makes a free use of the Polish member of the Resistance movement’s testimony of the holocaust to create a hybrid piece between documentary and fiction. Laurent Nunez, in Les Récidivistes, writes a novel in the form of an autobiography using styles and voices of great French writers: Proust, Genet, Duras, Quignard. Victoria Patterson is the author of the just published novel This Vacant Paradise, loosely based on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Siva Vaidhyanathan is the author of The Googlization of Everything and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity.