The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most fertile tensions in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative writing explores how the interplay between the given and the imagined, the real and the virtual, the world as we find it and the world as we make it, functions as a generative matrix for literary experimentation. Each contributor considers the question of attention and explores how attending to something -- a text, a place, a moment, a detail -- has the capacity to transform both perceiver and perceived.

Drawing together analyses of...