The French Publishers Agency, a New York-based rights operation, serves as a bridge between French publishers and American editors. They evaluate hundreds of titles each year and before offering a carefully curated selection to U.S. houses for possible translation and publication, selling the rights to an average of two dozen books per year.
Alice Tassel, who has directed the agency since 2018 after joining as an intern more than two decades ago, said the FPA's model sets it apart from most rights operations in the market. "We don't have an exclusive catalog," she said. "We work with more or less 50 publishers in France and the broader francophone world, and we pick the titles." The agency represents works from the largest French publishers, such as Gallimard and Hachette, to more niche operations, acting as co-agent on selected titles rather than managing a publisher's full list. A subsidiary of France Livre, the FPA receives a grant from the French Ministry of Culture to fund its New York office. Tassel runs the agency together with literary agent Pascale Montadert.
In 2025, the FPA evaluated 271 titles—150 in fiction and 121 in nonfiction—ultimately choosing nine fiction titles and 16 nonfiction books to actively pitch to U.S. publishers. By the end of the year they had sold rights to 20 titles.
The most persistent trend Tassel has observed over the past decade is growing American interest in francophone writers from beyond metropolitan France—authors from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East whose work centers immigration, postcolonial identity, and what she described as "multilingual realities." That appetite aligns with the broader 2025 market, where French titles most frequently translated into English skew toward literary fiction, historical thrillers, and contemporary social dramas, with recurring themes of memory, generational trauma, and political consciousness. Tassel characterized the current moment as one of "renewed appetite for socially and historically engaged storytelling".
Asked what distinguishes those books and why they sell, Tassel is blunt. "They are books an American couldn't write," she said. "They have the insight, the knowledge, and the sensibility that an American, even if they know the place, even if they've been there, simply doesn't have."
The FPA has had particular success with Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, a small literary independent that publishes eight to ten books each year; since 2020, the agency has placed nine of its titles with U.S. publishers. For nonfiction, La Découverte—a left-leaning Paris house with a strong list in anthropology, sociology, and history—has been especially popular.
Among the challenges the FPA faces daily, translation costs rank highest. "A lot of publishers say they're interested, but they claim a book would cost too much to translate," Tassel said. The FPA's response is to maintain a pool of translators who provide sample translations at no charge—hoping eventually to win the full commission—and it helps U.S. publishers navigate French government grant programs that subsidize translation costs. "That's all we can do," Tassel said. "We cannot give you the money."
For nonfiction, it's anonymity. "We have problems selling nonfiction books by authors who don't have a platform here," Tassel said. She cited feminist essayist Mona Chollet as a prime example, noting she's "a major essayist in France on gender and society" whose work carries significant influence in Europe but has a limited U.S. audience. Chollet's bestseller Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes (2018), published in English as In Defense of Witches (2022), sold over 370,000 copies in France and explores witch hunts as metaphors for modern misogyny toward women.
But it's not just nonfiction titles that can be difficult to place. La Horde du Contrevent, a sprawling speculative novel by Alain Damasio, sold 560,000 copies in France and the agency spent two to three years submitting the book, including a full English translation, to U.S. publishers. "Every two months I would receive at least one or two requests asking if it existed in English," Tassel said, noting they were unable to sell it. "Sometimes you have the demand from the public, but publishers wouldn't take it on. It was a huge book at 700 pages." Abrams ultimately acquired it through a different channel and will publish it this October as Horde of the Counterwind, in a translation by Alexander Dickow.
Sometimes there are exceptions. One notable sale was Nathalie Cabrol's The Secret Life of the Universe with Scribner. Cabrol, a French-American astrobiologist and director of the Sagan Institute, translated the book herself. "When an author can deliver a credible English manuscript, the barriers drop considerably," Tassel said.
Despite having been in business since 1983, the FPA continues to face one recurring source of confusion, Tassel said, and that is the agency's frequent conflation with the Villa Albertine Book Office, which promotes French authors through residencies, tours, and cultural programming in the U.S.."We're just dealing with rights. That’s all we do, and it is something that we do extremely well.”
