Catherine Meurisse designed a limited-edition tote bag for Albertine’s 10th year anniversary in 2024. We are pleased to offer a 10 percent discount on purchase of any of her books and a Meurisse tote bag.

If you can’t get enough of heavenly divinations from our Albertine Constellation Ornament or our starry bookmarks, try the classic Tarot de Marseille to see what the new year holds.

Until the end of the year, Albertine will be offering a free Proust-themed totebag with purchase of a Pléiade Proust complete coffret.

If you’re not ready to commit to a full year of reading Proust, you can also start with the Dictionnaire Amoureux de Proust, created by the Enthovens and presented in a beautifully illustrated, lavish edition.

This new Gallimard volume unites Rimbaud, the most radical and most fantastical of France’s poets, with the beloved trailblazing writer and musician, Patti Smith. For lovers of drama, of honesty, of passion, of poetry.

Another hallucinatory pairing: Georges Bataille and Anselm Kiefer. Bataille’s novel combines the hedonism and terror of the pre-war period, following a young man’s long and trippy voyage across Europe in the company of three very different and quasi-imaginary women. Their journey ends in Germany, facing a Hitler Youth group. Kiefer’s gorgeous and sober paintings tell their own accompanying story.

It can be hard to buy fiction as a gift, because taste is so individual and because your best-read friends have likely read everything already. But one of our favorites from this year is Polina Panassenko’s A voix haute. Buy one as a gift and one for yourself and read it together.

After growing up in France, a young woman who dreams of becoming an actress returns to Russia to live with her grandfather and enroll in the Moscow National Theater School. As Vladimir Putin’s reelection sparks protests, she asks her grandfather about the past. He remains enigmatic, but his granddaughter gradually manages to uncover some family secrets.

Olivier Grondeau’s layered debut about freedom, poetry, and imprisonment is worth reading and rereading.

This spellbinding portrait of contemporary Cameroon also unfolds the fate of a fragile Africa and holds up a scathing mirror to all dictatorships. Hemley Boum crafts a sweeping epic about the disillusionment of the people, the roots of corruption, and the power of women when they unite.

Containing over 170 recipes, many of them introduced with the author’s distinctive flair for witty and charming anecdotes, French Cooking for Two is about friendship as much as it is about preparing a French dinner for two. Friendship has its own distinctive seasons, constantly changing and evolving, just as the years revolve. Cooking for a friend, you can show your affection in a direct, practical way. Composing a menu to suit or intrigue a particular beloved person, you are demonstrating how well you understand and appreciate them.

Focaccia, Japanese sandwich bread, matcha-white chocolate breads… Blending French tradition with Japanese influences, Yoshimi Landemaine, co-founder of Landemaine and Land & Monkeys, explores in this guide the diversity and benefits of fruit- and grain-based yeasts for making natural sourdough and creating vibrant, more easily digestible breads.

From recolored Autochrome plates from World War I to the tens of millions of #pornfood images; from a single family’s collection of photo albums spanning over 40 years to the epic history of the recipe cards from Elle, Manger à l’oeil traces the unique history of the French relationship with their meals. This century of depictions of our meals is explored through the lens of leading figures in photography, whose images have become iconic documents over time. These images are juxtaposed with a collection of amateur photographs, advertising and press images, and clips from cult television shows. This exploration of our consumption patterns, our resistance, and our commitments—both toward the image and toward our food—is mirrored by a chronology of how the ways photography is disseminated and shared have evolved.

For armchair travelers and amateur historians, this portolan chart of Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa comes from the “Atles Català,” a collection of six parchments attributed to the Majorcan Cresques Abraham and presented to the young Charles VI, who had just been crowned King of France, in 1380. It brings together the finest geographical knowledge (coastal outlines, scales) and nautical expertise (compass rose, rhumb lines) and, in the less-known territories, veers into a motley mix of fantasy.

For anyone who keeps a diary, a sketchbook, or a secret manuscript they have been working on for years. Reliefs notebooks come with a stapled binding, blank and lined pages, and illustrated plates.

January 1947. Simone de Beauvoir sets out on a four-month lecture tour of the most prestigious universities in the United States. From New York to New Orleans, via Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Mexico, she travels through a segregated America as a left-wing woman and an existentialist philosopher.

These various stops and encounters helped her experience her freedom, but also allowed her to observe gender relations and ask herself: What is a woman? An extraordinary journey of self-discovery that would inform the theories of The Second Sex, the future bible of feminism.

For anyone who has a beautiful coffee table and an eye for design, this exquisite exhibition catalog will be an instant favorite.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Pompidou are presenting an exhibition devoted to the graphic work of Louise Bourgeois, a major figure in contemporary art who operated on the fringes of the major movements of the 20th century, highlighting the interdependence of drawing and printmaking and the main themes within her body of work.

Born in Italy to American parents, the painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) spent most of his career in London and the greater part of his life traveling. Paris would be much more than just a stopover for him. When he settled there in 1874, the capital was buzzing with excitement, and the brilliant young artist found his calling there. Trained in the studios of Carolus-Duran and Léon Bonnat, Sargent captivated the Parisian elite. Through the virtuosity of his brushwork, the power of his portraits, and the elegance of his vision, he established his unique style. One hundred years after his death, this exceptional retrospective, bringing together nearly 130 major works, restores Sargent’s Parisian period—undoubtedly the most decisive and vibrant of his career—to its rightful place in the spotlight

What if, in the near future, those who have witnessed forests vanish, rivers die, and landscapes burn decided to respond to the catastrophe with violence?

Two environmental activists take the head of a polluting company hostage. But what was supposed to be an isolated act gradually reveals a much larger plan. All over the world, men and women are preparing to kill or die for their beliefs.

In this play—at once a political thriller, a contemporary tragedy, and an ecological fable—Laurent Gaudé explores, in the tradition of Albert Camus, the moral limits of armed struggle. How far can one go to defend a just cause?

Viser juste is the story of a lifetime, captured through writing. Writing and playing—to feel again, to reclaim the sensory experience lost in childhood—through the dual framework of an investigation and a playful method devised by the author. In this narrative, the author conducts an investigation: she reconstructs “crime scenes,” put into perspective by the detached gaze of the future.

For our youngest readers, a complete collection of all the adventures of Madeline, a fearless little girl full of mischief and vitality. Madeline, first published in 1939, and its five sequels have charmed generations of readers, and have become true classics.

Celebrate one of the world’s most popular and beloved fictional characters with this beautiful, deluxe collection, bringing together all six of the Madeline books in one volume. In each of these books, Bemelmans’ humorous verse, his immortal characters—Miss Clavel, Pepito, the magician, the others—and his wonderful, whimsical drawings of Paris combine to create a memorable reading experience for people of all ages.

If you can’t get enough of Greek mythology but want to branch out from the Odyssey, Murielle Szac invites children to delve back into these classic stories by following the character of Theseus. Over the course of 100 episodes, the young hero grows and finds his place in the world. He encounters numerous mythical figures (Heracles, the centaur Chiron, Oedipus, Phaedra, and, of course, Ariadne and the Minotaur).