UPCOMING EVENTS

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• LD201 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

  • When
    20 Dec 2025
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, Salle 3, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    6

  Register

  Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

   “Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”  -Carl Sandburg

  Program Description:

  Tea and Tattered Pages is a multi-faceted program designed to bring poetry closer to the fore in our lives, and perhaps create a small community around it. Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, reciting, and trying to live poetry.

  You can get a sense of what sorts of activities we will be doing on the program's web page:

  Tea and Tattered Pages

  December Agenda

  December will be our first foray into writing poetry. Our poet-in-residence, Heather Hartley, will lead the session with readings and provide writing prompts that will serve as departure points for creating a poem. The goal is to prepare us for a measured, step-wise process over the coming months that leads to us writing the one poem we have inside us that we've always wanted to write.

  This session will accommodate sixteen attendees: eleven in person, and five on Zoom. We've set up a pricing structure that acknowledges the two different modes. Cancellation with a refund is only available until Monday, 15 December.

  Note: This is the first of four inter-connected poetry writing sessions that will culminate in May 2026. Due to this modality, the sessions are only open to 1-year WICE members and WICE volunteers. 

  If you have any questions, please contact literature@wice-paris.org

  Our Poet-in-Residence: Heather Hartley

  

  Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

  Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

  www.heatherhartleyink.com

  Show details
• LJ091 Murder, They Read: "The Silver Pigs," by Lindsey Davis

  • When
    09 Jan 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  The Silver Pigs, the first novel in Lindsey Davis’s long-running Marcus Didius Falco series, introduces readers to a wonderfully sardonic “private informer” operating in the bustling, dangerous world of ancient Rome. When Falco encounters a frightened young woman, Sosia Camillina, he stumbles into a conspiracy involving stolen silver ingots—“silver pigs”—and high-level political intrigue. The investigation leads him from Rome’s teeming streets to Roman Britain, where a mining plot hints at treason and where Falco’s undercover work shows him the brutal realities of slavery and imperial power.

  Along the way, Falco clashes—and eventually connects—with Helena Justina, a sharp-witted senator’s daughter whose social status makes her an unlikely match. Their relationship begins in mutual irritation and class resentment, but gradually develops into one of the series’ most engaging threads. Davis mixes mystery, humor, and historical detail, giving readers a vivid sense of daily life under Vespasian while poking fun at Roman politics, bureaucracy, and snobbery.

  This first book sets the tone for the whole series: part detective story, part adventure, part social comedy. A great discussion angle is how Davis uses wit and irreverence to humanize history and expose the hypocrisies of empire—while giving us a reluctant, endearingly flawed hero to root for.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 02 January, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.  

  Registration opens on Thursday, 18 December.

  
  

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• LJ101 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

  • When
    10 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    10

  Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

   "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

  Program Description:

  Tea and Tattered Pages is a multi-faceted program designed to bring poetry closer to the fore in our lives, and perhaps create a small community around it. Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, reciting, and trying to live poetry.

  There will be no fixed agenda for events; rather, forthcoming events will usually be decided by vote as we move through the year, and published as things are decided. You can get a sense of what sorts of activities we will be doing on the program's web page:

  Tea and Tattered Pages

  January Agenda

  The January meeting will be about poetry in translation. Using Baudelaire and his Les Fleurs du Mal as a reference, we will examine selected passages and verses as they have been rendered by various translators and discuss the differences.
  

  General Guidelines

  In general, registration for each activity will open the day after the previous activity finishes. Registration for the January meeting will open on Sunday, 21 December.

  If you have any questions, please contact literature@wice-paris.org

  Our Poet-in-Residence: Heather Hartley

  

  Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

  Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

  www.heatherhartleyink.com

  Show details
• LJ131 Classic Mysteries: "Hercule Poirot’s Christmas", by Agatha Christie

  • When
    13 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie (also published as Murder for Christmas), is a classic locked-room whodunit wrapped in holiday trappings and family hostility. The wealthy, tyrannical Simeon Lee summons his estranged children home for Christmas, only to be found savagely murdered in his locked bedroom on Christmas Eve. With heavy snowfall trapping everyone in the country house, suspicion falls on each member of the dysfunctional family—along with unexpected guests and mysterious newcomers whose motives are far from festive. Poirot, visiting a friend nearby, is drawn into the investigation and must untangle resentments, secrets, and long-buried betrayals. Sharp, tense, and darkly humorous, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas uses the cozy setting of the holiday season to expose the toxic dynamics beneath a respectable family façade, turning a traditional holiday gathering into a brilliantly constructed mystery about revenge, identity, and the corrosive power of old wounds.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 06 January, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration opens on Thursday, 18 December.

  
  

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• LJ151 Living Room Players: "Twelfth Night," by William Shakespeare

  • When
    15 Jan 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the Marais
  • Spaces left
    8

  Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, is a witty, romantic comedy that blends mistaken identities, unrequited love, and playful gender disguise.

  Shipwrecked on the shores of Illyria, Viola believes her twin brother is drowned and disguises herself as a young man, entering the service of Duke Orsino. The Duke sends “him” to woo Countess Olivia on his behalf—but Olivia falls for the messenger instead, while Viola quietly falls for Orsino. Around them swirls a richly comic subplot involving drunken revelry, forged letters, and comeuppance for pompous self-important figures. As disguises unravel and identities are revealed, the play explores love in all its messy, unpredictable forms—desire, grief, infatuation, and the joy of reunion. Lyrical, mischievous, and humane, Twelfth Night turns comedy into a celebration of love’s bewildering power and the delight of finding one’s true self amid confusion.

  Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's four "shipwreck" plays—the others being "The Comedy of Errors," "The Tempest," and "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." It is believed to have been written around 1601–1602 as a Twelfth Night entertainment for the close of the Christmas season.

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  The general concept of The Living Room Players is that people receive the script by email about a week before the reading, and then roles are assigned at the meeting. Attendees sit around a living room and simply read their parts with as much theatrical flourish as they care to give (but there are no expectations of real acting).
  

  The readings generally take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number will be sent in the two reminder emails.

  Registration for the January reading opens on Thursday, 18 December.

  
  

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• BJ151 Exploring French History through Novels

  • When
    15 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Le Nelson's Café, 16 rue de Coquillière, 75001 Paris

  Register

  Free for WICE members! Come with us on a captivating journey where literature and history intertwine to offer a uniquely vivid perspective on France's past. You’ll plunge into a vibrant tapestry of pivotal events, cultural shifts, and influential figures…while falling under the spell of some of France’s best historical novelists.  And then the discussion begins!

  Our meetings take place in French so you'll enhance your understanding of the past while simultaneously improving your French reading, comprehension, and speaking skills in a friendly convivial group.

  Group facilitator: Claudia Oudet, French teacher, editor, and translator, will offer linguistic help and literary/historical insights. (Please note: Claudia will be unable to join us on 20 November.)

  We'll meet in person at Le Nelson's Café, 16 rue Coquillière, 75001  

  • Métro : Lignes 1/4/7/11/14 RER A/B/D Châtelet Les Halles 
  • Bus : 74 – 85 : Louvre – Etienne Marcel / Bourse du commerce

  Préparez-vous à discuter:

  
  

  “Les Rois maudits, tome 5: La Louve de France”

  Philippe V le Long vient de mourir avant d'avoir atteint trente ans et, comme son frère Louis X le Hutin, sans descendance mâle. Le troisième fils du Roi de fer, le faible Charles IV le Bel, lui succède. Une évasion de la tour de Londres; la chevauchée cruelle conduite par une reine française d'Angleterre pour chasser du trône son époux; un atroce assassinat perpétré sur un souverain... La relance de l'Histoire vient d'Angleterre. La "Louvre de France," c'est le tragique surnom que les chroniqueurs donnèrent à la reine Isabelle, fille de Philippe le Bel, qui semblait avoir transporté outre-Manche la malédiction des templiers.

  Come prepared to discuss:

  Les Rois maudits, volume 5 La Louve de France 

  Philip V the Long had just died before reaching the age of thirty and, like his brother Louis X the Quarrelsome, without male heirs. The third son of the Iron King, the weak Charles IV the Fair, succeeded him. An escape from the Tower of London; the cruel campaign led by a French queen of England to drive her husband from the throne; a horrific assassination of a sovereign... The revival of history came from England. The “She-wolf of France” was the tragic nickname given by chroniclers to Queen Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair, who seemed to have brought the curse of the Knights Templar across the Channel.

  
  

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• LJ161 Café Littéraire: Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

  • When
    16 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  Missing Person ("Rue des Boutiques Obscures), by Patrick Modiano, is a quiet, hypnotic mystery about identity, memory, and the scars left by history. The novel follows Guy Roland, a man living in 1960s Paris who suffers from amnesia and hires a private detective—then gradually turns detective himself—to uncover who he once was. His search leads through cafés, old photographs, vanished acquaintances, and the half-erased world of wartime France, where collaboration and persecution left deep traces. Rather than delivering a conventional solution, Modiano constructs a delicate investigation into the uncertainty of self: who we are when the past is lost, and how a life can be shaped by what remains unspoken. Lyrical, restrained, and suffused with melancholy, Missing Person transforms a detective story into a meditation on memory, disappearance, and the fragile act of trying to reclaim a life that may never have been fully one’s own.
  

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 09 January, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the January meeting opens on Saturday, 20 December 2025.

  Show details
• LJ231 Booker Books: "Atonement," by Ian McKewan

  • When
    23 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is a sweeping, emotionally intricate novel that explores love, guilt, class, and the slippery nature of truth. Set across three eras—an English country estate in 1935, the battlefields and hospitals of World War II, and the late twentieth century—the story begins when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses fragments of a charged encounter between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s brilliant son. Misreading what she sees with a child’s limited understanding and a budding writer’s imagination, Briony makes an accusation that shatters all three lives.

  As the novel moves through the brutality of war and into the quiet reckoning of Briony’s adulthood, McEwan probes the long shadows cast by a single, irrevocable mistake. The book becomes both a love story and a meditation on memory, storytelling, and the human need for redemption. Lyrical, unsettling, and formally inventive, Atonement challenges readers to consider whether true forgiveness is possible—and whether art can ever make amends for the harm people do to one another.

  

  The Booker Book group reads and discusses books that have either received, or been on the short list for, the Booker Prize.

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the January meeting opens on Thursday, 18 December

  
  

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• LJ241 Left Bank Lit: "A Moveable Feast," by Ernest Hemingway

  • When
    24 Jan 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Few works capture the time, place, and spirit of the Lost Generation on Paris’s Left Bank as vividly as Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

  Written in the late 1950s and published posthumously in 1964, the memoir looks back on Hemingway’s years in 1920s Paris, when he was a struggling young writer surrounded by an extraordinary circle of expatriate artists and thinkers. Through spare, luminous prose, he evokes the cafés, the cold-water flats, and the creative ferment that defined that era. The book offers intimate portraits of figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and James Joyce, while also tracing Hemingway’s own artistic apprenticeship—his belief in discipline, simplicity, and the art of “getting the words right.”

  Beneath the nostalgia runs a current of melancholy, a recognition that the friendships, marriages, and ideals of that generation were as fleeting as the Paris light he so loved. A Moveable Feast endures as both an elegy for a vanished world and a celebration of the creative energy that once made Paris the center of modernist life.

  

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 17 January, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  The book group meets in the downstairs of the Impact Café.

  Registration for the January meeting opens on Thursday, 18 December 2025.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• LF061 Murder, They Read: "Norwegian by Night," by Derek Miller

  • When
    06 Feb 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    10

  Register

  Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller, was awarded the 2013 Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger award, and was picked by the Guardian newspaper as one of the best crime and thriller novels of 2013. The story follows 82-year-old Sheldon Horowitz, a recently widowed American ex-Marine, who moves to Oslo, Norway, to live with his granddaughter Rhea and her Norwegian husband, Lars. He’s grappling with the cultural dislocation posed by the move, along with the memories and regrets of a long life. When a violent crime is committed in his apartment building, Sheldon rescues a young boy threatened by the events and goes on the run through Norway with him, evading the Oslo police as well as the murderer and his cohort.

  The novel follows the separate trajectories of the 3 groups as they pursue their separate goals. We get to know police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård, a wise and discerning woman, as she directs her team in search of the murderer and of Sheldon and the child he’s saved. And we learn a bit about the perpetrator of the crime and his associates, and gain some perspective on the forces that have shaped them.

  The story is humorous and deeply moving, often at the same time, mixing suspense with clever dialog, dark humor, and observations on Norwegian culture, aging, guilt and memory.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration opens on Saturday, 10 January.

  
  
  

  
  

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• LF101 Classic Mysteries: "Gaudy Night", Dorothy L. Sayers

  • When
    10 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers, is an intellectually rich mystery that blends crime detection with questions of women’s education, independence, and moral responsibility. When Harriet Vane—writer, Oxford graduate, and sometime companion of Lord Peter Wimsey—is invited back to her old Oxford women’s college for a celebration, a series of anonymous poison-pen letters and acts of vandalism threaten to scandalize the institution and undermine the fragile space women have carved out in academia. Harriet is asked to investigate discreetly, and her inquiry forces her to confront both her own past and the complex tensions between scholarship, loyalty, and personal freedom. When Wimsey eventually joins the investigation, the novel deepens into a thoughtful exploration of love founded not on rescue but on equality. Layered, elegant, and psychologically acute, Gaudy Night turns the detective genre into a meditation on conscience, vocation, and what it means for a woman to choose her own life.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 03 February, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration opens on Wednesday, 14 January.

  
  

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• LF141 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

  • When
    14 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    12

  Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

   "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

  Program Description:

  Tea and Tattered Pages is a multi-faceted program designed to bring poetry closer to the fore in our lives, and perhaps create a small community around it. Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, reciting, and trying to live poetry.

  There will be no fixed agenda for events; rather, forthcoming events will usually be decided by vote as we move through the year, and published as things are decided. You can get a sense of what sorts of activities we will be doing on the program's web page:

  Tea and Tattered Pages

  February Agenda

  This is a continuation of the poetry writing process we started in December. Anna Eklund-Cheong will provide an introduction to classic three-line, 17-syllable Japanese haiku, and attendees will endeavor to distill the essence of the one poem they want to write into a haiku. That haiku will be used in a future session as a start point for further development of their poetic idea.

  
  

  Registration opens on Sunday, 21 December.

  If you have any questions, please contact literature@wice-paris.org

  Instructor: Anna Eklund-Cheong

  Anna has published over 130 haiku in nineteen haiku journals since 2015.  she has received Honorable Mention, Golden Haiku Contest, Washington, DC (2018); Runner-up, Golden Haiku Contest, Washington, DC (2015, 2016, and 2017).  Her poems have appeared in Frogpond, The Heron's Nest, Blithe Spirit, Presence, Hedgerow, Acorn, Failed Haiku, cattails, and tinywords, among other publications. In October 2025, her collection Little Acorns was published.

  Website: Anna Eklund-Cheong - Paris Haiku

  
  

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• LF191 Living Room Players: To Be Determined

  • When
    19 Feb 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the Marais
  • Spaces left
    8

  The February reading has not been selected yet.

  
  

  The general concept of The Living Room Players is that people receive the script by email about a week before the reading, and then roles are assigned at the meeting. Attendees sit around a living room and simply read their parts with as much theatrical flourish as they care to give (but there are no expectations of real acting).
  

  The readings generally take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number will be sent in the two reminder emails.

  Registration for the February reading opens on Friday, 19 January.

  
  

  Show details
• LF201 Café Littéraire: The Life Before Us, by Romain Gary

  • When
    20 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  The Life Before Us ("La Vie devant soi"), by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), is a tender, bittersweet novel about an unlikely family formed on the margins of Parisian society. The story is narrated by Momo, an Arab boy raised in the apartment of Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and former prostitute who now cares for the children of other sex workers. As Momo grows, he pieces together the truth of his origins and struggles to understand a world marked by prejudice, poverty, and the lingering traumas of the past. What might sound bleak becomes, in Gary’s hands, deeply humane—full of humor, affection, and luminous moments of connection. The novel explores how love can take unconventional forms, how dignity can flourish despite hardship, and how two wounded people can become each other’s home. Poignant, funny, and quietly devastating, The Life Before Us invites readers to see vulnerability and compassion where society often looks away.
  

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 13 February, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the February meeting opens on Saturday, 17 January.

  Show details
• LF271 Booker Books: TBD

  • When
    27 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  The Booker Book group reads and discusses books that have either received, or been on the short list for, the Booker Prize.

  The book for February has not been chosen yet, but it will by by 24 January.

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the February meeting opens on Saturday, 24 January.

  
  

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• LF281 Left Bank Lit: "Nightwood," by Djuna Barnes

  • When
    28 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood offers a very different but equally haunting vision of expatriate life in interwar Paris. Written after nearly a decade Barnes spent among the city’s avant-garde circles, the novel reflects the disquiet and disillusionment that underlay the glitter of the Left Bank.

  First published in 1936 with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, Nightwood is a modernist masterpiece of lyrical density and emotional darkness. Set among a drifting cast of expatriates, aristocrats, and outcasts, it traces the doomed love affair between the American Nora Flood and the elusive Robin Vote, whose restlessness and ambiguity make her both irresistible and unknowable. Through long, baroque sentences and dreamlike imagery, Barnes captures a nocturnal Paris of desire, loss, and spiritual exile—far removed from Hemingway’s sunlit cafés. Her portrayal of sexual identity, alienation, and obsession was revolutionary for its time, and her uncompromising style influenced writers from William Burroughs to Jeanette Winterson.

  Nightwood remains one of the most challenging and rewarding works to emerge from the Left Bank’s modernist experiment, a fevered echo of the same era that Hemingway immortalized in daylight.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 21 February, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  The book group meets in the downstairs of the Impact Café.

  Registration for the February meeting opens on Sunday, 25 January.

  
  

  
  

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• LM061 Murder, They Read: "The Book of Wizzy," by Ann Chamberlin

  • When
    06 Mar 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  The Book of Wizzy is set in the world within a world of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) community in the ski resort of Park City, Utah. The author provides us an insider view on that world and its accompanying perspective.

  Eighteen-year-old Brittany Bingham is working as a housekeeper for posh condominiums in Park City when she discovers a body in a hot tub. Since Brittany’s parents are serving an LDS mission in Southern California, she calls on her aunt Helen for aid, but Helen’s feeling stretched thin. She’s still mourning the death of her child, Elizabeth,15 years ago. Wizzy, as Helen called her, died at the age of 3, and Helen feels that she and Wizzy are in daily communication through song. Additionally, she’s been asked by her bishop to take on a major responsibility. Everyone else is ready to dismiss the skier’s death as an accident, but Helen feels a responsibility to Brittany. What to do? Helen’s response to this dilemma, as she proceeds to solve the mystery and to increasingly develop and exercise her own power and autonomy w/in the structure of her church and beliefs, forms the backbone of the story.

  NOTE: the author will join us for this discussion.
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered seven days before the event, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration opens on Saturday, 07 February.

  
  

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• LM101 Classic Mysteries: "The Daughter of Time", by Josephine Tey

  • When
    10 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, lower level (salle 3), 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, is a clever, unconventional detective novel that turns historical mystery into a gripping intellectual puzzle. Laid up in the hospital and bored, Inspector Alan Grant becomes fascinated by a portrait of King Richard III and is struck by how unlike a villain he appears. Grant begins a “bedside investigation,” digging through chronicles, letters, and historical accounts to test the centuries-old claim that Richard murdered his young nephews in the Tower of London. As he weighs propaganda, politics, and Tudor mythmaking, the case becomes less about a single king’s guilt than about how history itself is written—and distorted. Quiet, slyly funny, and deeply absorbing, The Daughter of Time transforms armchair research into suspense, inviting readers to rethink what they think they know and to consider whether the truth of the past can ever be recovered from the stories we’ve inherited.

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 03 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration opens on Wednesday, 11 February.

  
  

  Show details
• LM141 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

  • When
    14 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    12

  Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

   "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry." -Emily Dickinson

  Program Description:

  Tea and Tattered Pages is a multi-faceted program designed to bring poetry closer to the fore in our lives, and perhaps create a small community around it. Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, reciting, and trying to live poetry.

  There will be no fixed agenda for events; rather, forthcoming events will usually be decided by vote as we move through the year, and published as things are decided. You can get a sense of what sorts of activities we will be doing on the program's web page:

  Tea and Tattered Pages

  March Agenda

  This is the third of four sessions aimed at producing the one poem everyone might have inside themselves that has been longing to get written.

  In February Anna Eklund-Cheong provided an introduction to classic three-line, 17-syllable Japanese haiku, and attendees endeavored to distill the essence of their poem into a haiku.

  In this session, Heather Hartley will lead the class into using that haiku as a start point for further development of the poetic idea.

  Registration opens on Sunday, 15 February.

  If you have any questions, please contact literature@wice-paris.org

  Instructors:

  Heather Hartley

  Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

  Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

  www.heatherhartleyink.com

  Anna Eklund-Cheong

  Anna has published over 130 haiku in nineteen haiku journals since 2015.  she has received Honorable Mention, Golden Haiku Contest, Washington, DC (2018); Runner-up, Golden Haiku Contest, Washington, DC (2015, 2016, and 2017).  Her poems have appeared in Frogpond, The Heron's Nest, Blithe Spirit, Presence, Hedgerow, Acorn, Failed Haiku, cattails, and tinywords, among other publications. In October 2025, her collection Little Acorns was published.

  Website: Anna Eklund-Cheong - Paris Haiku

  
  

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• LM191 Living Room Players: To Be Determined

  • When
    19 Mar 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the Marais
  • Spaces left
    8

  The March reading has not been selected yet.

  
  

  The general concept of The Living Room Players is that people receive the script by email about a week before the reading, and then roles are assigned at the meeting. Attendees sit around a living room and simply read their parts with as much theatrical flourish as they care to give (but there are no expectations of real acting).
  

  The readings generally take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number will be sent in the two reminder emails.

  Registration for the February reading opens on Friday, 20 February.

  
  

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• LM201 Café Littéraire: TBD

  • When
    20 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  The March book has not been chosen yet. It will either be "The Negotiator: The Masterclass at Saint-Germain," by Francis Walder, or "The House of Scorta," by Laurent Gaudet.

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 17 December, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the March meeting opens on Saturday, 21 February.

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• LM271 Booker Books: TBD

  • When
    27 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    11

  The Booker Book group reads and discusses books that have either received, or been on the short list for, the Booker Prize.

  The book for March has not been chosen yet, but it will by by 28 February.

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the February meeting opens on Saturday, 28 February.

  
  

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• LM281 Left Bank Lit: Being Geniuses Together, by Robert McAlmon

  • When
    28 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together is one of the most candid insider accounts of the expatriate world that flourished in 1920s Paris. McAlmon—writer, publisher, and close friend to Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and Pound—spent a decade at the center of the Left Bank’s literary ferment. Originally published in 1938 and later expanded by Kay Boyle, the book blends memoir, sketches, and portraits of the extraordinary constellation of artists who defined the modernist era. McAlmon’s voice is wry, weary, and unsentimental; he strips away the mythic glow surrounding the “Lost Generation,” revealing instead a community of ambitious, restless, and often self-destructive creators. His accounts of evenings at cafés, of failed manuscripts and fragile friendships, convey both the freedom and the futility that shadowed those years. Where Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast celebrates the memory of Paris and Barnes’s Nightwood transforms it into dream, McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together records it as lived experience—vivid, cynical, and unvarnished. The result is a rare, firsthand chronicle of a moment when the boundaries between art and life blurred in the smoky rooms and long nights of the Left Bank.

  

  Note: This book is mildly challenging to find. It is not available in Kindle, or from Amazon.fr. 

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 21 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  The book group meets in the downstairs of the Impact Café.

  Registration for the March meeting opens on Sunday, 01 March.

  
  

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• LA251 Left Bank Lit: "Paris Was Yesterday," by Janet (Genêt) Flanner

  • When
    25 Apr 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Few writers observed expatriate Paris with as much wit, elegance, and insight as Janet Flanner. Her collection Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 gathers selected pieces from her celebrated “Letter from Paris” column in The New Yorker, written under the pen name Genêt.

  Living in Paris for decades, Flanner chronicled the city’s transformation from the exuberant café society of the 1920s through the political tensions and cultural upheavals of the 1930s. Her dispatches capture both the glitter and the gravity of the era—portraits of artists like Picasso and Colette sit beside reports on fashion, scandal, and the rise of fascism. With her cool, incisive style and cosmopolitan detachment, Flanner stands apart from her contemporaries on the Left Bank: neither romanticizing Paris like Hemingway nor mythologizing it like Barnes, but recording it as it was—vivid, contradictory, and alive.

  Paris Was Yesterday offers an incomparable window onto the daily rhythms, personalities, and anxieties of a city—and a generation—on the edge of modern history.

  
  

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• LY231 Left Bank Lit: "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot

  • When
    23 May 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Though T. S. Eliot lived primarily in London, his formative year in Paris (1910–1911) immersed him in French Symbolism and the cosmopolitan ferment that would later nourish the Left Bank modernists. In this way, he serves as both precursor and distant cousin to the writers of the Lost Generation—an intellectual link between their lived bohemianism and the emerging high modernist movement.

  Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) stands as one of the defining works of that movement, distilling the fragmentation, despair, and search for meaning that followed the First World War. Structured as a collage of voices, languages, and literary echoes, the poem merges myth and modern life into a dense tapestry of cultural and spiritual exhaustion. “April is the cruellest month,” its famous opening line, sets the tone for a world haunted by sterility yet yearning for renewal. Though written in London, The Waste Land resonates with the same sensibility that haunted the cafés of Paris—a generation seeking coherence in chaos. For your series, it bridges Flanner’s documentary clarity and Stein’s exuberant self-mythologizing: the poetic center of gravity around which modernism itself turned.

  
  

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• LU271 Left Bank Lit: "The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas," by Gertrude Stein

  • When
    27 Jun 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    11

  Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is one of the most charming and paradoxical works of modernist literature—a memoir written by Stein, but in the voice of her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas.

  Through this playful act of ventriloquism, Stein recounts their shared life in Paris from the early 1900s through the 1930s, when their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became the heart of the city’s artistic avant-garde. On Saturday evenings, their salon gathered an extraordinary constellation of painters and writers—Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and many others—who came to debate, provoke, and be seen. The book mixes gossip and genius, art history and personal mythmaking, with Stein’s distinctive, rhythmic prose giving the whole an almost musical quality. Both self-portrait and social chronicle,

  The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas captures the exuberance and eccentricity of a generation inventing itself in real time. As the closing work in your series, it returns the reader to the source: the Left Bank as a living ecosystem of conversation, experiment, and friendship—a “moveable feast” of its own making.
  

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