Village Voices: A Memoir of the Village Voice Bookstore, Paris, 1982-2012

A celebration of the legacy of the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, founded by Odile Hellier in 1982--a hub of social life and a refuge for artists, writers, and anglophone literary life for over three decades until it closed in 2012.

＂My entire sense of Paris centers on Odile and the bookshop.＂ --Richard Ford
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In July of 1982, on a quiet boulevard just off the bustling Boulevard Saint-German, Odile Hellier opened the Village Voice Bookshop. Over the nextthree decades, the blue-shuttered shop would become one of the most famous English-language bookstores in Paris--a vivacious hub for artists, writers, and a haven for anglophone literary life. After the its closing, Odile found herself with hundreds of tapes of various talks given at the bookshop by the greatest artists of their generation.

These voices from the past were the spontaneous exchanges of literary and cultural icons such as Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Edmund White, Art Spiegelman, and Stephen Spender, all of whom were drawn to Odile’s tiny bookstore on Rue Princesse. This carefully curated historical archive is an enduring conversation across time, and a memoir of one woman’s beloved store.

＂... when you squeezed into the narrow event space on the Voice’s upper floor, French and international book lovers mingled with Parisian editors and publishers, shared a glass of wine, a new discovery, a heretical opinion, and took the conversation outside to the sidewalk of the Rue Princesse, for another shared pleasure: an unguilty cigarette.＂ -- Livia Manera, The New Yorker

＂A stroll from rue de l’Odéon, Les Deux Magots or the Luxembourg Gardens, the hanging sign reads Village Voice: Anglo-American Bookshop. The narrow door and window frames are painted Greek island blue... Lingering a while in front of the window display, you’ll want to dive inside, into an ocean of story.＂ --Hazel Rowley, Bookforum

Odile Hellier was born in the South of France during World War II and raised in the two different regions of Lorraine, near the German border still haunted by past wars, and Brittany fronting the Atlantic Ocean. After advanced studies in Russian language and literature she taught in high school for two years, she decided to broaden her scope and work in world organizations. During the fall of 1968, Hellier enrolled in a professional school in Paris that trained translators and interpreters in international relations. Hellier is the founder and owner of the Village Voice Bookshop--a hub of Anglophone literary life and culture that operated in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris for over thirty years. This book is Hellier’s archival project and personal memoir. Charles Kenneth ＂C. K.＂ Williams (introduction) was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.