EDITORIAL The New York Times recently published a feature on its ‘Ten Best Books’ for each year since 2000. Only a few were British (e.g., Ali Smith’s Autumn in 2017) and those were practically the only ones I had read. But despite the tempting titles I noted from the NYT list, my attention had turned East to works from Europe. Sometimes the encounter was accidental. I fished Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (Sommarboken, 1972) out of a ‘Little Free Library’ while walking to the post office. It was, in the words in the flap, ‘profoundly life-affirming’. Even that didn’t scare me off—as it might have in an American writer. Its setting and themes—childhood imagination, nature on an island in the Gulf of Finland, generational bonds—were as advertised. The careful prose and lack of a predictable narrative arc also appealed to me. Jansson offered sweetly constructed vignettes of lives separate from mine, in a place I didn’t know existed. A more deliberate choice was to look into the works of French Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux. The Years (2008), as we say in America, knocked my socks off. I have made my way through the lesser works in her oeuvre as her fame prompted translation, and recently came across the first Englishing of Regarde les lumières mon amour (2014; Look at the Lights My Love, Yale UP, 2023). Her choice of subject is akin to William Cowper’s ‘I sing the sofa...’ which opens The Task (1785)—it is evidence one may write about anything. Ernaux explains: ‘Therefore, in order to “relate life,” ours today, I had no hesitation about choosing superstores as my subject. I saw an opportunity to provide an account of the real practice of their routine use, far removed from conventional discourses often tinged with aversion that these so-called non-places arouse and which in no way correspond to my experience of them’ (7). If Ernaux were the sort of writer who made allusions (or used similes, or tropes of any kind), she might have quoted Gertrude Stein: ‘There’s no there there’. The book chronicles a year of regular visits to shop at an Auchan superstore in a new Paris suburb in 2012-13: it is ‘A free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place’ (11). Her aim is a far cry from the promises in the blurbs for a recent American book, Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries (2021), the puffs for which promise a ‘page-turning expose’, ‘laugh-outloud prose’, and a ‘wild investigation’. I found her book moving but will confess that were the same book written about visits to a suburban Walmart superstore in America I wouldn’t have considered reading it at all. I last entered a Walmart in 1984. Aversion is too mild a word for what I feel; revulsion would be better. The cause is in part my knowledge of the way Walmart hollowed out small town, local business America, in part simply the scale. Aisle after aisle, shelf after shelf, of stuff. But reading Ernaux made me also realize that my disdain reflected groupthink; people who make their living teaching Dickens don’t much care for Walmart. Even though Dickens might have. 3