For Augustin Trapenard, the literary rentrée begins much earlier than for any other reader: in May, when some 450 new releases sent by publishers begin to accumulate in his apartment in the 10th arrondissementee arrondissement of Paris. When we met him at the end of June in his smart local bookstore, Nordest, he had already read around 180 of them: big pieces, like the latest from Alice Zeniter or Gaël Faye, and more personal choices including Blackouts by New Yorker Justin Torres.
« Dizzy ” sighs the journalist, thinking about what he still has to study before La Grande Librairie on September 4, where he will receive Alice Zeniter, Maylis de Kerangal, Jérôme Ferrari, Miguel Bonnefoy and Sébastien Dubrule. However, pleasure outweighs weariness. The Ecole Normale Supérieure graduate, an agrégé in English and professor of English and American literature at the ENS, has had a passion for books since he was seven years old. ” Not only do they bring me a lot of joy, but they saved the lost kid that I was. “, says the Emily Brontë specialist, now 45 years old.
