Charles Dantzig
Charles Dantzig joined the publishing company Les Belles Lettres, launching three new collections: "Brique", specialising in contemporary literature, "Eux & nous", in which French writers discuss the authors of classical Antiquity, and "Trésors de la nouvelle", which, as its name suggests, specialises in short stories.
He also translated the first French edition of a collection of Oscar Wilde's journalism, Aristotle at an Afternoon Tea (Aristote à l'heure du thé).
Charles Dantzig also oversaw the publication of Marcel Schwob's complete works (Œuvres, Les Belles Lettres).
He then moved to Grasset, where he oversees the "Cahiers Rouges" series, breathing fresh life into the list by publishing cult classics as well as major twentieth-century diarists and authors of memoirs, or publishing brand-new anthologies (Le Cahier Rouge des plus belles lettres de langue française, 2017).
Between 2006 and 2008, Charles Dantzig penned the epilogue for the special reports in the monthly Magazine Littéraire, offering his faithful readership his reliably iconoclastic literary views on everything from the French-speaking world to authors and psychoanalysis.
This work of fiction was the first indication of Charles Dantzig's passion for literature and his ironic handling of posturing and comedy.
It was a choral novel with a scholarly structure that supposedly drew on a TV documentary on the death of a young film-maker by the name of Birbillaz.
It leaves behind its ostensible subject, the portrait of the absent figure, Birbillaz, to focus on his brother – his double, his mirror image – like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson: a failure in life, bitter, rotten to the core, who says no to everything, to the point of obstinacy and pain.
Each chapter is a theme or an image that is addressed by the polyphony of the thoughts and experience of the seven characters in a surprising choral structure.
The Dictionnaire gave him free rein to develop his aesthetic vision of literature, illustrated with numerous comments on style.
The work enjoyed considerable critical and popular esteem, not only in France but also abroad, and was hailed as the major literary event of the year.
"A bestseller in the francophone world, Dantzig's Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française is en extraordinary undertaking, and anyone who buys it is expecting a fact-filled reference book will be either disappointed or, more likely, happily surprised.
It met with wide critical acclaim and made the front cover of Le Monde in a cartoon by Plantu.
Based on personal memories, historical or artistic examples, this various and startling essay raises the questions of the permanence of gestures and their true meaning, whether it can be found.
In 2019, Charles Dantzig published his Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature mondiale (Grasset).
At the same time, Charles Dantzig's novel Je m'appelle François was published in paperback and his translations of Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald were republished in the Cahiers Rouges collection.
Les nageurs and La Diva aux longs cils were presented at the Maison Française in Oxford in 2010.
He was an associate curator of the inaugural exhibition of the new Centre Pompidou museum in Metz, Chefs-d'œuvre?, where the Charles Dantzig Room explored the notion of the masterpiece in literature.
[16] In April 2015, Charles Dantzig has created and supervises the annual review and collection Le Courage, published at Grasset.
