The US authors finding literary success in France

David Vann, Jean Hegland, Pete Fromm, Benjamin Whitmer and Lance Weller share something in common.

They are five US authors whose books are published in French but whose recent work has struggled to find publishers in their native country.

Instead, their books have found a home with Gallmeister, a French publishing house founded in 2006 by Olivier Gallmeister.

Gallmeister is renowned for specialising in nature writing and neo-noir, with a particular focus on authors who explore the solitude of wilderness or tackle topical issues such as global warming, gun crime or the struggles of the working class.

The French translation of Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (Dans la forêt, 2017) sold 400,000 copies. David Vann’s Sukkwan Island, published by Gallmeister in 2010, won the Prix Médicis and has sold more than 270,000 copies.

Yet, despite this success, Mr Vann has not been published by a US company since 2017, having released five books primarily through Gallmeister.

Commercial pressures in US publishing

“What used to be exceptional 20 years ago seems more common today,” said Benjamin Guérif, director of Gallmeister’s Totem collection, under which these five authors are published.

There is no single explanation for the phenomenon.

Mr Guérif points first to the concentration of the US publishing industry. The pressure of market constraints, which push publishers to follow trends, reduces opportunities for writers in less popular genres, he said.

The size of the potential readership may add to those commercial pressures.

A 2025 YouGov survey found that 40% of Americans had not read a single book that year, compared with 13% in France, according to a survey by the Centre national du livre.

At the other end of the scale, 63% of French people had read at least five books, against just 13% of Americans.

As a result, US publishers may be less willing to gamble on books considered difficult or unlikely to reach a mass audience.

“I can at least intellectually understand why US publishers aren’t currently willing to bring out work like mine which, I’m told, can be a little difficult,” Mr Weller told The Connexion.

“If a book doesn’t have at least a better-than-average chance of becoming a blockbuster then it becomes a pretty hard sell.”

Gallmeister publishes four of his books, including Le Cercueil de Job, a novel about the 1864 American Civil War massacre of Black Union troops at Fort Pillow.

“US editors cited a perceived disinterest from the reading public in such stories, as well as a certain discomfort with putting forth the story of such a racially charged event in a country currently, justifiably, boiling over with racial unrest,” he wrote on his website.

Authors tackle violence and censorship

He is not the only one who writes about sensitive issues affecting the US.

Both Mr Vann and Mr Whitmer have long denounced its pervasive violence.

“Whoever writes about America without touching upon its violence does not write about America,” Mr Whitmer told Télérama.

Mr Vann, in Le Monde, was even more direct: “The United States produces killers.”

Another worrying trend for authors is the growing number of books being banned in the US.

There were 10,000 bans recorded in the 2023–2024 school year alone, according to PEN America, with titles addressing race, racism, LGBTQ+ themes or sexual content disproportionately targeted.

Gallmeister, for its part, has never explicitly been told the reasons why its authors are not published in the US. However, it says it does not factor ideology into its selection process.

Instead, it focuses on the quality of writing, according to Mr Guérif, echoing Olivier Gallmeister’s assessment of Benjamin Whitmer: “Benjamin Whitmer is not an outstanding neo-noir writer. He is an outstanding writer. Period.”

French readers offer a different experience

Mr Guérif said that many American writers have a particular relationship with French books and literature.

“That exchange, that game of mirrors, still exists today. And there is something rather pleasing about that.”

Several of Gallmeister’s US authors have since nurtured strong relationships with French readers.

Pete Fromm, author of the critically acclaimed Indian Creek, regularly meets them during signings and discussion sessions, including in Quimper (Finistère), Mont-de-Marsan (Landes) or at Colomb’s high school in Lure (Haute-Saône).

The same goes for Mr Weller.

“At events where I speak, I always learn a lot about my own writing through the questions I’m asked,” he said.

“In the US, such discussions quite often revolve around either plot points in the novel discussed or answering questions about ‘how’ I got published and could I please tell the audience how they too might go about it.

“In France, I get to talk about ‘craft’ and, because of that extemporaneous give-and-take, I always learn something that maybe I hadn’t realised before – either about my own work or about the interests of readers who read closely and critically.

“At any rate, after getting home again my writing always feels like it improves,” he said.

Could US publication be back on the cards?

For all the welcome and critical success these writers have found in France, publication in the English-speaking world can still be hard to secure.

But perhaps things are slowly changing. World English rights to Mr Vann’s upcoming book, From Before Memory, have been bought by UK-based publishing house Pushkin Press.

Due for release in 2027, it will be his first novel in English in eight years.

“So much the better,” Mr Guérif said, after learning about it during the interview.

“That such a writer is not published in the US remains bonkers.”