Our agency represents over fifty distinguished French publishers, with a selection of works of particular interest to an English-language readership.

A brief history

"If you want to sell foreign books to American publishers, complaining at length or denouncing America's so-called 'cultural isolation' won't be of any help: I thought we just had to go by the rules, I mean the American rules of a reliable agent, of personal contacts and a harsh book selection. While some French professionals mocked the idea, as it always happens in our country, some others agreed, and this is how it all started," remembers François Samuelson, founder and first director of the Bureau du Livre Français (BLF)/French Publishers' Representative, as it was then called.

Among those French professionals whose curiosity and ambitions were aroused by the project were a dozen publishers of nonfiction who believed that French nonfiction wasn’t getting enough recognition in the United States. There was room for improvement, so Samuelson left Paris for New York in 1982 to research the idea. He captured the attention of Lewis Carroll’s French translator, the directeur du livre at the Ministry of Culture, Jean Gattégno, who offered his moral and financial support. In the spring of 1983, the French Publishers’ Representative wasn’t the first agency specializing in French literature to establish itself in the United States. Georges Borchardt, some thirty years earlier, had paved the way and was representing Éditions de Minuit’s prestigious list, as well as Le Seuil’s. But the consensus was that there was room for more than one agency. The agency fulfilled their desire to be represented in person, easing communication between publishing houses on two continents as a time when the fastest means of communication other than the extremely expensive telephone call was the teletype machine…

Because of the type of publishers it represented in the first years, the agency’s sales were mostly of nonfiction works sold mostly to university presses. An intense and profitable cooperation began. The agency’s archives show its history, with texts from preeminent French thinkers over the years. On the agency’s shelves side by side are the original and translated editions of On Television, by Pierre Bourdieux; Empircism and Subjectivity, by Gilles Deleuze; The Legend of Bouvines, by Georges Duby; The Defeat of the Mind, by Alain Finkielkraut; Unforeseen History, by Emmanuel Lévinas; Look, Listen, Read, by Claude Lévi-Strauss; Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, by Maurice-Merleau Ponty; Realms of Memory, by Pierre Nora; and The Just, by Paul Ricoeur. More recently, there are A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, by André Compte-Sponville; Hannah Arendt, Mélanie Klein, and Colette, by Julia Kristeva; Atheist Manifesto, by Michel Serres. Works of historians such as Marc Fumaroli, François Furet and Ernst Nolte, and Jean-François Revel or Pierre Vidal-Nacquet were also successfully disseminated, as were the works of many now classic authors: Robert Antelme, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bernanos, André Breton, Patrick Chamoiseau, René Char, Andrée Chedid, Marguerite Duras, Jean Giono, Édouard Glissant, Valéry Larbaud, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, Patrick Modiano, Georges Perec, Francis Ponge, Raymond Queneau, and Boris Vian.

François Samuelson directed the agency until 1989. The 1990s brought some changes: in 1991, the French Publishers’ Representative became affiliated with France Edition, known today as the BIEF, which brought together under one umbrella the different organizations in France that promoted French books to the world. At that time, France Edition had more than 200 members, all of whom could take advantage of the agency’s services, greatly expanding their lists of potential clients. Then in 1997, the company was incorporated as an American for-profit, under the name France Edition, Inc., doing business as the French Publisher’s Agency. It was renamed one more time, in 2005, officially becoming the French Publisher’s Agency, Inc.

Today, the French Publisher’s Agency represents an average of fifty French publishers in any given year, many of whom have been with the agency since the beginning. The agency’s task is still a challenging onein the face of the ambivalence of American readers toward translations, which represent only 3% of the market. Of that 3%, French books perform relatively well compared with books from other languages: nearly 30% of all translated titles in the United States come from France. *

Since its founding, the agency has facilitated the signing of almost 1,250 contracts, an average of 50 a year, even during a concurrent change in American publishers’ tastes. A predilection for the big names in literature, literary criticism, philosophy, history, and sociology has given way to a preference for contemporary novels and new, provocative thinkers. After Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Glissant, Kristeva, Lévinas, Michaux, Perec, and Queneau, novelists such as Stéphane Audeguy, Emmanuel Carrère, Assia Djebar, Laurent Gaudé, Anna Gavalda, Amélie Nothomb, Daniel Pennac, Jean-Christophe Rufin, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt have become the new favorites. Irène Némirovsky’s novels, published in France by Albin Michel, Denoël and Grasset, represent together the largest number of titles by one author and the most financially successful of the fiction titles that the agency sold since 2004.

In terms of numbers, one third of the contracts that the agency represents are for fiction (396 fiction to 765 nonfiction).

A trend toward diversity is also apparent in nonfiction, with new areas of popularity being testimony (Gilbert Michlin’s Of No Interest to the Nation, Wayne State University Press), how-to (Marie-Jeanne Lorente’s The Art of Papermaking with Plants, from W.W. Norton), gastronomy (Hervé This’ Kitchen Mysteries, from Columbia University Press), and spirituality (Jean-Yves Leloup’s The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary, from Inner Traditions), as well as scholarly works with new perspectives on America’s own politics, Islam, and the Arab world. And the agency has often served as a gateway to non-French francophone authors and authors who find their way into French and who entrust French publishers with their world rights. This latter group includes writers born overseas, the first-generation descendants of immigrants from North Africa or other countries scattered throughout the globe, exiles, foreigners living in France, and even authors who initiated a project in France but wrote in another language (including English). From this group, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ahmad Al-Tifashi and Samir Amin, Marta Aleksandra Balinska, Nina Berberova, Vladimir Bartol, Shan Sa, Anouar Benmalek, and Georgi Gospodinov have made their way into the catalog of the French Publishers’ Agenc. Among the francophone authors born outside of France and writing in French is Alain Mabanckou (African Psycho, published by Soft Skull).

The French Publishers’ Agency also works closely with the Book Department at the French Embassy. Through its program of intellectual exchange, French authors are invited each year to give readings, attend conferences, give lectures, and do book signings that allow them to meet their American readers. In 2007 Anna Galvada and Stéphane Audeguy, whose books were represented by the agency, were on tour and benefited from joint events organized by the embassy, their U.S. publishers, and the agency.

* Source: Anne-Sophie Simenel, To Be or Not To Be Translated, PEN/IRL, report on the international situation of literary translation, Esther Allen (ed.), April 2007, pp.85-100.