ABSTRACT
The success story began with a series of mini-essays that a novelist, Philippe Delerm, started writing for Jacques Réda, then chief editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française. When Réda retired from the venerable literary magazine, he showed a stack of Delerm's chroniques —all devoted to the modest delights of everyday life— to Gérard Bourgadier, the director of L'Arpenteur, one of Gallimard's imprints. Delerm avows that his essays on minuscule pleasures go back to earlier texts written not only for children, as he specifies, but especially as reflections of the way children think. Delerm describes activities that obedient, well-behaved children secretly adore or desire despite, or because of, their parents' disapproval. He sketches even subtler moments: doing homework on the kitchen table, being the first to wake up in the morning, staying home sick from school, sitting down in the grass after a soccer match, or those final days of summer vacation.
