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.
This collective memoir brings to life a literary history of a heady time in Paris, capturing a myriad of voices for whom “literature was not just a pastime but the very stuff of life.”
Village Voices is a collective memoir that brings to life the authors, publishers, and friends who frequented one of the most famous English-Language bookstores in Paris—the Village Voice bookshop. Founded by Odile Hellier in 1982, Village Voice was a hub for artists, writers, and anglophone literary life for over three decades. Told through the voices of artists that were reckoning, preserving, challenging, and archiving the time and languages that they lived in, this carefully curated collection, organized thematically, encapsulates some of the most important reflections and debates of 20th century literary history. From Allen Ginsberg to Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Raymond Carver, and Amy Tan, Hellier preserves the decades-long vibrant readings and dialogues that took place in this tiny bookshop on the Rue Princesse.
Hellier mines decades of archival footage to present anecdotes and insight from the spontaneous and informal exchanges that occurred among generations of literary and cultural icons. These artists present a multidimensional landscape of Parisian literary history in dialogue with American and global literary conversation. The book is a life-long curatorial project, a conversation across time, and a historical archive, created by a bookseller seeking to preserve the history of her much-loved bookstore.
Odile Hellier Remembers Edmund White (1940-2025)
On the early morning of June 4, 2025, I woke up with an email from my friend Steven Barclay announcing the sad news of the sudden death of our dear Edmund White. I had not seen Edmund in a long while, but I immediately felt the pain one suffers at the loss of a close friend.
For almost two decades Edmund actively participated in the life of our Village Voice Bookshop in Paris (1982-2012), largely contributing to its success. He arrived in the city in 1983, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the US. The first book he presented at the bookshop was his novel A Boy’s Own Story praised by Susan Sontag as the work of ‘one of the outstanding writers of prose in America today.’ He stayed in Paris until the late 90’s, launching over those years no fewer than fourteen of his books— including his singular biography of Jean Genet. His works on Proust and Rimbaud came out after he had left Paris for New York.
Edmund was an author who embraced many different subjects, including some touchy ones. Always trusting the judgment of his audience and their sense of humor, with obvious delight he would choose to read some of the most sulfurous pages from his gay novels. These performances always ended with great applause, large smiles and good laughter. He was much loved by his readers who crowded into the bookshop to listen to him.
After the closing of the Village Bookshop in 2012, I saw Edmund once more. It was at a talk he gave at La Maison de la Poésie across from the Pompidou Center in the Marais. He was accompanied by Michael Carroll, his husband, also a writer.
Over the years I continued to pay attention to his new publications, but the one I most cherish and regularly return to is The Unpunished Vice, A Life of Reading (2018) in which he invites readers to discover his immense and eclectic library that reveals the extraordinary range of his literary tastes. In it he also shares with us his special relation with every single book of the hundreds of authors mentioned in the book, showing how each one of them is important to him. A trove of literary treasures.
“My lodestar was always Paris,” and “Colette my first great passion.” Whether in The Unpunished Vice or his earlier The Flâneur, A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2004), Edmund tells us again and again of his love for Paris, one very different from tours, and one that includes “his” beloved French writers.
(See in my memoir Village Voices for Edmund’s mentions of Michel Foucault (p. 60); Jean Genet (p. 61) and his great interview by René de Ceccatty (p. 62-64) )
My last contact with Edmund was an email received on January 6, 2025:
“Dear Odile, best wishes for the new year! Sorry I haven’t participated in the memoir about the bookstore. It certainly was one of the many joys of living in Paris and it became my literary home for years… I’m fine busy writing though my new books are no longer published in France… “
Reading these last words I felt a pang of sadness. It is my hope that Edmund’s past and latest works will find their way back to France and in French, a language Edmund spoke fluently and honored by writing unforgettable biographies about such iconic writers as Proust and Baudelaire.
Odile Hellier
June 7, 2025
Paris
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. Village Voices is Hellier’s archival project and personal memoir.