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I have to confess that I have not really understood the point of book trailers. It seems counterintuitive to market a book with a video, but perhaps I just need to rewire my brain. Well, if more book trailers were like the one above for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, then I would completely be on board. It’s clever! Funny! Heart warming! Of course, not all authors are connected enough to have celebrity authors and famous actors appear in their book trailers, but I think there’s a lesson in the trailer nonetheless: it’s okay to have some fun.

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.

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According to its MySpace page, La Féline is “a trio that likes pop, epic folk, beauty, strangeness, instrumental music, and B movies” (“un trio qui aime la pop, le folk épique, le beau, le bizarre, la musique instrumentale et les séries B”). But I prefer this description that lead singer Agnès Gayraud gave in an English-language interview.

We’re three people. A dark-haired girl, Agnès. who sings and plays guitar, gently leading the band, a grey-haired boy, Xavier, who plays keyboards, and a brown-haired boy, Stéphane, playing drums. We all live in Paris. We’re all looking for something—without knowing exactly what. We only agree on the fact we’re looking for it.

La Féline’s music is sometimes in French, sometimes in English. This song is in both, creating a Franco-American mélange in which French pop tradition wanders freely in the folksy, Wild West.

Below are the lyrics and a translation of the French.

HibOO d’Live : La Féline “Mystery Train” from Le-HibOO.com on Vimeo.

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I just learned about this really interesting project, the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP), that promotes Japanese literature to a number of foreign countries. Sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, JLPP has been around since 2002 and has so far been behind the publication of 34 Japanese titles translated into English. JLPP selects about 10 books per year, and the titles are translated into several languages, including English, French, German, and Russian. It then promotes the translated works to publishers, and following publication, JLPP buys a good number of the translated titles and distributes them to libraries. What a good way to increase access to translated works!

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Tim Parks, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, had an interesting post recently about the pressure that writers (particularly non-American writers) feel to reach an international audience and the way this is affecting what and how they write:

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon . . . [M]ore and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

Parks goes on to describe how this pressure has increased with the advent of electronic submissions, which enable an author to send a new work simultaneously to publishers all over the world, such that international rights may even be purchased before the writer has found a publisher in his or her own country:

An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world . . . This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

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