A Swiss poetry review turns 150, as Paris fêtes the small press at the Salon de la revue

The literary journal has its own festival, the Salon de la revue, and this year En attendant Nadeau has marked the occasion with a series of articles on how individual reviews are made — who edits them, what texts they defend, and why. The anchor of the coverage is the 150th anniversary of La Revue de belles-lettres (RBL), the Swiss poetry journal, marked by an interview with its team members David André and Marion Graf about the publication's history and its attention to voice and what the site calls "l'émotion lucide de la poésie."

A companion piece, built for the anniversary, asked members of the RBL to each choose a poem freely and say something about it, gathering a set of personal readings under the title "Le poème, plein d'appels," according to En attendant Nadeau.

The series extends beyond the RBL to other journals represented at the Salon. One article profiles the Swiss review L'Ours Blanc, with the whole editorial team describing how they work and choose texts while holding together a diversity of viewpoints within a shared community. Another, by Emmanuel Jousse, looks at the Cahiers Jaurès, which since the 1960s has carried out historical work around Jean Jaurès, described as distinguishing carefully between history and politics. Marie Virolle writes on A littérature-action, a journal moving between France and Algeria that the outlet calls "un maquis" — a review that has endured by resisting. A further piece covers La moitié du fourbi and its unusually inventive relationship to reality and narrative form, and another is devoted to the review Multitudes SR.

In a framing piece, En attendant Nadeau, a partner of the Salon de la revue, presents the event as a celebration of the sharing of ideas and the arts, arguing that journals bring a richness and energy particularly needed, in the outlet's words, in an era short on lucidity.