UPCOMING EVENTS

Switch to Calendar View

• 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
    2

  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.

  
  
  

  
  

  Show details
• 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
    7

  Register

  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.

  
  

  Show details
• LF141 Tea and Tattered Pages: Adventures in Poetry

  • When
    14 Feb 2026
  •  
    2:30 PM - 5:30 PM
  • Location
    Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • Spaces left
    8

  Register

  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 January. 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.

  
  

  Note: The poetry sessions have been increased to three hours (14:30 - 17:30). Also, there are two attendance/payment options: in-person for €40, or via Zoom for €25.

  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

  
  

  Show details
• LF191 Living Room Players: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," by Tom Stoppard

  • When
    19 Feb 2026
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the Marais (address sent after registration)
  • Spaces left
    1

  Register

  

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, is an absurdist tragicomedy that retells the events of Hamlet from the bewildered perspective of two minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  Through wordplay and anxious attempts at reasoning, the two wrestle with questions of free will, identity and time. They are symbols of human uncertainty, exploring how easily lives can be spent waiting for lines that never come.

  As the Living Room Players, we will read the script going around the room so that everyone has a chance to participate in their dialogue.

  Registration for the February reading opens on Monday, 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
    2

  Register

  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: "Audition," by Katie Kitamura

  • When
    27 Feb 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Upstairs at Le Nelson's, 16 Rue Coquillière, 75001
  • Spaces left
    9

  Register

  

  Audition, by Katie Kitamura, is a taut, psychologically charged novel that examines intimacy, performance, and the fragile boundaries between truth and self-invention. The story centers on a woman whose carefully constructed life—shaped by her marriage, her work, and her sense of control—begins to fracture when an encounter tied to an audition unsettles her assumptions about those closest to her. Small moments of uncertainty accumulate, exposing the quiet power dynamics and unspoken compromises that structure her relationships.

  As the narrative tightens, Kitamura shifts the ground beneath the reader, revealing how identity can be shaped by what we choose to show, conceal, or rehearse for others. The novel becomes less about a single event than about the roles people play to survive emotional proximity, and the cost of maintaining those roles over time. Spare, precise, and deeply unsettling, Audition probes the tension between observation and participation, asking how well we can ever know another person—or even ourselves—once performance becomes indistinguishable from reality.

  Audition was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2025. It was long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates 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.

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

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Show details
• 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
    4

  Register

  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.

  
  

  
  

  Show details
• LM051 "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived," by Adam Rutherford

  • When
    05 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's appt. in the 15th (details after registration)
  • Spaces left
    3

  Register

   "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived," by Adam Rutherford, is an ambitious and highly readable exploration of human history told through the lens of modern genetics. Drawing on advances in DNA analysis, Rutherford shows how scientists can trace ancient migrations, identify long-lost populations, and reveal just how closely related all humans are—often in ways that upend familiar ideas about race, ancestry, and identity.

  Moving fluidly between deep prehistory and the present, the book introduces key discoveries and personalities in genetics while explaining complex concepts with clarity, humor, and restraint. Rutherford is careful to acknowledge both the power and the limits of genetic knowledge, confronting how such science has been misunderstood or misused, even as it reshapes our understanding of who we are.

  Neither a dry scientific treatise nor a simplistic popularization, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived blends science, history, and storytelling to illuminate humanity’s shared past. The result is a thoughtful, often surprising account of how a few strands of DNA connect each of us to an immense, intertwined human story—one far older, stranger, and more collective than we might imagine.

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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

  
  

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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.

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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.

  
  

  Show details
• 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.
  

  Show details