Worried about the demise of reading? Come to France, where we’re up to our eyes in print.

From hefty literary magazines to thriving newspaper kiosks and book sales, the French publishing industry refuses to let printed matter die

It took me nine months of 20-hours-a-week French language instruction, and the mycelial network of a year spent in Strasbourg, to feel courageous enough to walk into a bookshop to buy something more challenging than Le Petit Prince. I was immediately humbled: there was an entire new universe, just barely linguistically accessible, and I had no idea who was who, who was writing what or what might interest me.

A year later, I came back to France for graduate school after an 11-month interlude working for an NGO in southern Chad, still feeling like an intellectual toddler in my now two-year-old second language. During the first week of courses, I asked a highly bilingual classmate where in the French media landscape I could find long-form narrative reporting with a literary edge – something comparable to the New Yorker. “You have to read XXI,” he told me, and then a few days later brought me a copy.