Motivation

This page gathers a few testimonies about why reading Jean Paulhan still matters today: for his rigor, his sense of language, and the singular place he holds in modern literary history.

That Jean Paulhan is gravely missing today, at this precise moment in history; that we miss the authority of his accuracy among phrase-makers, and the authority of his sense of justice among fanatics (...) I cannot help thinking of it with sadness and concern.
But I know there will always be readers returning to his small books, as one returns to what literature has produced not as its most magnificent or most overwhelming, but as its most precious and discreetly substantial.
- Philippe Jaccottet

Jean Paulhan did not simplify my life. Nor did he exactly illuminate it. But unquestionably, he made it, secretly, comic, unpredictable, sensitive, porous, fallible, laughable, and dramatic: interesting on a considerable, almost extravagant scale.
- Patrick Kechichian