PARIS — When Adrien Bosc, the 28-year-old publisher of Feuilleton, a French quarterly that has received some buzz here for bringing American long-form journalism to this side of the Atlantic, tries to describe his publication, he is often at a loss for words. At least French ones.
Here, where fiction is traditionally considered to be the only literature with a capital L, nonfiction remains less a genre in its own right than a hodgepodge of other categories: biographies, histories and political essays. Even the term “la non-fiction” has limited currency.
For that reason, Mr. Bosc said, “I tell French readers it’s an investigation that reads like a novel,” to explain the articles in the quarterly.
The latest issue of Feuilleton, which comes out on Thursday, focuses on the United States and includes translations of a New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian about a secret chemical-weapons testing program run by the U.S. Army during the Cold War and a Harper’s piece by Nathaniel Rich on American cults. But even past issues whose themes, like China and the Arab Spring, have nothing to do with the United States heavily feature American nonfiction writers largely because France is in short supply of them.
That, however, is starting to change now that Mr. Bosc and a new generation of young French publishers, well read in English and well traveled in the United States, are introducing more narrative nonfiction to France, translating not only American classics, but also building platforms for French writers to try their hand at the form.
“I wanted to show that the American tradition of making space for long investigations was worth it,” Mr. Bosc said.
Thanks in part to the founding in recent years of about 30 quarterlies like Feuilleton — publications that the French media has dubbed “mooks,” a portmanteau for “magazines” and “books” — long-form journalism is now taking hold. These mooks, which include XXI, Schnock, and Le Believer, the local edition of McSweeney’s San Francisco magazine, are largely inspired by American and British publications and mix long investigative pieces and profiles with short stories and personal essays.
They contrast with mainstream magazines like L’Express and Le Point, equivalents to Time magazine, which focus on news coverage and political opinion, but give little room for in-depth storytelling; and smaller reviews, like Cahiers du Cinéma, which focus on criticism.
Besides Feuilleton, Mr. Bosc created a cousin publication, Desports, in 2013 focused on sports writing, like Gay Talese’s 1996 Esquire profile of Muhammad Ali; and a nonfiction book imprint whose first title, released in March, was a collection of Mr. Talese’s writings.
Although he was familiar with a few American nonfiction writers already translated in France, including Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, Mr. Bosc didn’t decide to start his own publication until he discovered the New Yorker archives online in 2004, and Harper’s soon after.
With the help of Gérard Berréby, the head of the publishing house Allia, Mr. Bosc came up with the idea of Feuilleton in 2011. “I quit my job at the time and created the magazine on a shoestring, using the basement of Allia, where Gérard stocked his books,” he said.
Washington Square — another imprint specializing in American nonfiction that was started by Julien Charnay in 2012 — made a splash last year by publishing Janet Malcolm’s 1990 study about the ethics of journalism, “The Journalist and the Murderer.” The book, which garnered attention after it received a rave review in Le Monde, served as a kind of introduction to the form and techniques of narrative nonfiction in France.
“Telling a true story with literary techniques still blows people’s minds here,” Mr. Charnay said in an interview. But the audience for it is still relatively small because, he said, “We simply don’t have prestigious platforms capable of launching a nonfiction author’s career.”
With the rise of mooks and quarterlies in France, however, some new nonfiction writers have come on the scene and the few authors established in the genre are taking advantage of these emerging publications.
Emmanuel Carrère, whose 2011 nonfiction book “Limonov” is being published in the United States in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is one example. His book began as a 2008 article for the first issue of the mook XXI, which publishes long-form investigative journalism, mostly by French writers.
The book details the life of Eduard Limonov, the Russian poet and opponent of President Vladimir V. Putin, from his homeless days in New York to his years of detention in Moscow, where Mr. Carrère visited him.
Mr. Carrère shifted from fiction to nonfiction in 2000 with “The Adversary,” an account of the French murderer and impostor Jean-Claude Romand modeled on Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” In an interview, he bristled at the prevailing assumption in France that nonfiction is not literature. “We seem to consider that all literary greatness is reserved for novels,” he said, “as if outside fiction what’s being written were something a bit subordinate, which is completely stupid.”
Indeed la rentrée littéraire, the early-autumn period when the most books are published here, is still a celebration of the novel, with the most prestigious fiction prizes being awarded in November.
The numbers for the houses and publications dedicated to nonfiction are still relatively small: “The Journalist and the Murderer” sold roughly 2,400 copies, and XXI and Feuilleton sell roughly 200,000 and 28,000 copies a year respectively. Still, the interest the few nonfiction works introduced this fall have garnered is promising.
For example, the French publisher Oliver Gallmeister said he could not believe he had had to order a reprint of the narrative nonfiction book “Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter” by the Alaskan writer David Vann only a few weeks after its initial release in September.
“I did not anticipate the enthusiasm of French readers for a nonfiction story about the culture of violence in America,” Mr. Gallmeister said.
These publications are slowly gaining legitimacy too. In 2009, Jean-François Kahn, the co-founder of the French weekly Marianne, dismissed mooks and their ambition to cover timely subjects in a more creative way: “Under the pretext of not giving into the dictatorship of the moment, you can’t find anything other than grand commentaries, grand investigations, profiles, philosophers’ columns; in short, paper magazines, but not information that would allow one to think for oneself,” he said.
“At the beginning, we heard journalists referring to the magazine as a U.E.O., an Unidentified Editorial Object,” said Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, a co-founder and the chief editor of XXI, and a distant cousin of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator who wrote “Le Petit Prince.”
But many readers have welcomed these publications. “Thank you XXI!” a reader posted on its website in March 2011. “I read about the world as if reading a novel, but it’s the REAL world.”