Our Paris correspondent tells us of what shook France, and perhaps all of Europe, forty years ago this month. — Levi Asher

It’s spring of 1968. France has emerged from post World War II reconstruction with an economy that is strong and growing. Consumer goods are plentiful, and France’s gross domestic product has surpassed that of Britain for the first time in 200 years. Charles De Gaulle is president. France is a major world power. All is right with the world. Or is it? …

There are a bunch of debut novels coming out right now by youngish literati already known to me from blogs or lit journals: Mark Sarvas, Keith Gessen, Nathaniel Rich, Ed Park (who Sarah Weinman calls “wonderful and giddy”). I don’t know if I’ll have time to read all these books, but I was happily surprised by a breakout novel from among this number: All The Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen.

How can I not …

1. Jonathan Gottschall, a professor and classicist, says literary critics should adopt scientific methods. This article is alternately silly and smart. It starts off silly:

But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the “outside world,” but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can’t find …

Jonathan Miles contributes the Shaken and Stirred column to the Sunday Styles section of The Times. His novel, “Dear American Airlines,” will be published in June.

Who better than the Shaken and Stirred columnist for the Sunday Styles section of the Times to review a book about Robert Frost? I can’t imagine why the New York Times Book Review would have chosen this critic for Fall of Frost, an impressionistic novel by Brian Hall that imagines details in the life of the …

1. Ha ha. I knew Penguin’s collaborative wiki-novel would be a dud. Still, whoever managed this experiment for Penguin should have tried harder to avoid the obvious traps of dumb jokiness and intentionally bad writing (”Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent”). Let the record show that for 24 hours starting on July 23 2004 over a hundred poets worked together on LitKicks to write a single long poem. But here’s the key: instead of letting the throng dictate the …

And now for something completely different …

Linda Plaisted is a visual artist whose work I’ve been following on Flickr for a few years now (full disclosure: sometimes Linda and I send each other neat stuff in the mail, and I have a few of her prints around my house). Lately, I’ve been thinking about storytelling and how it has a broader reach than writing alone, and while browsing some of Linda’s images, I was struck time and again by …