At the beginning of September comes the rentrée, as France returns to home, work and school after the summer holidays. For publishers, it’s the most important selling period of the year. This time there was the usual flurry of new books; some of them even worth reading. Popular authors clogged popular radio and television broadcasts, publishers published schedules of bookshop appearances of their stars, book-chat gossips gossiped about contenders for the big literary prizes. It was enjoyable, familiar, and predictable, even to the publicists’ ever-hopeful overuse of the word shock. Literary magazine Lire’s front cover pushed their choice for…