This weekend (June 18-20) in Paris, the much-venerated Shakespeare and Company bookstore is holding its fourth literary festival. Inaugurated in 2003, the festival has since settled into a biannual schedule, running in 2006, 2008, and now 2010. Each festival has centered on a different theme, including “Lost, Beat & New: Three Generations of Writers in Paris”; “Travel in Words: Celebrating Travel Literature”; and “Real Lives: Exploring Memoir and Biography.”

This year’s theme is “Storytelling & Politics”—appropriate, given that Shakespeare and Company founder George Whitman (now in his nineties) has always seen his bookstore as a political vehicle, even describing it as “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Check out this video to get a sense of the unique literary atmosphere he created.

The 2010 festival’s diverse, international roster of participating writers and artists will include Martin Amis (England), Fatima Bhutto (Pakistan), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Tjawangwa Dema (Botswana), Mathias Énard (France), Janine di Giovanni (United States), Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe), David Hare (England), Jack Hirschman (United States), Ian Jack (Scotland), Yusef Komunyakaa (United States), Hanif Kureishi (England), Nam Le (Vietnam), Philip Pullman (England), Carole Seymour-Jones (Wales), Raja Shehadeh (Palestine), and Gao Xingjian (China).

According to Publishers Weekly, this year’s festival will also mark the launch of a new literary magazine and literary prize. Beginning in 1967, Whitman published three issues of his Paris Magazine over the course of more than a decade. Keeping his title, the new publication will be edited by Fatema Ahmed, formerly the managing editor of Granta. Shakespeare will also announce its sponsorship of a biannual 10,000-euro prize for a novella of 20,000-30,000 words. It’s exciting to see the continued vitality of this iconic Left Bank establishment.

The long list for the Orange Prize for Fiction was announced last week. One of the top literary awards in the U.K., along with the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award, the £30,000 prize is given to a woman author of any nationality for the best original novel written in English.

Culled from a pile of 129 contenders, this year’s long list is comprised mostly of British authors, but there are also three from the U.S. (including Lorrie Moore and Barbara Kingsolver), as well as lone representatives from New Zealand and Morocco. In addition to the works of established authors, the list features seven debut novels, including Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You, which has, until now apparently, not received a single review from a British national newspaper.

See the full list here.

The Orange Prize is making news this year because of some provocative comments made by the chair of the judge’s panel, author and TV producer Daisy Goodwin, who complained that she’d been inundated by “misery literature”—a surfeit of rape, child abuse, and bereavement—that made her feel like a “social worker” on the verge of slitting her wrists.

“There was very little wit, and no jokes,” Goodwin told the Independent.

“I was surprised at how little I laughed,” she told the Guardian, charging that such novels represent little more than a repackaging of the highly marketable “misery memoir” and that publishers are “lagging behind what the public want.”

Goodwin also made repeated references to the neglected value of reading as “pleasure” and her desire to be absorbed in a “pleasurable” book. Some took her remarks as a call for lighter fare, but I think she is getting at something else when she says that, to be compelling, a story must have more than an “issue” at its core. Although Goodwin’s comments were inelegantly delivered, it seems legitimate to insist that a literary novel must be defined by its artistry—in its prose, in its ideas, and in the keen, unique subjectivity of its narrator or protagonist—not merely by its graphic depiction of violence or misfortune. Perhaps it was not the content of the “misery” novels that Goodwin objected to but rather the writing itself.

I’m particularly interested in the question of humor and how women might use it more, even in their darkest stories. Granted it’s not easy to be funny about personal tragedy, but it’s worth trying, as humor can transform a narrative of victimization into one of resistance and self-possession.