Books are central to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, avid reader of pulp fiction and philosophical treatises, classical drama and modernist novels, scientific tomes and Maoist doctrine, comic books and volumes of art history. Books inform Godard's thinking and inspire his work in a manner unlike that of any other filmmaker. Godard and his characters quote from books incessantly, altering and inflecting them in ways which provide an entry into his thoughts and his aesthetic, derived in large part from its literary component. How are viewers of his films to navigate this dizzying subterranean world of quotations, adaptations, references, homages and borrowings? In this one-of-a-kind volume, 50 specialists working in a dozen countries engage with 109 individual books by 90 authors found over nearly 70 years of Godard's films and writings. Each of these readable three-page mini-essays explores a corner of the extraordinary breadth and depth of Godard's reading, introducing the volume to the reader and unlocking its importance to Godard. Reading with Jean-Luc Godard is not only an invaluable tool for the study of Godard's films; it sheds new light on cinema's longstanding dialogue with the printed word and makes an original and lively contribution to writing the history of ideas. Fredric Jameson contributes both a preface and a coda to bookend Reading with Jean-Luc Godard. An extensive bibliography rounds out the volume to encourage readers to seek out some of the books they will discover and want to explore on their own as they read along with Godard.

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Timothy Barnard is a translator and film historian. His translations include The Andre Bazin Reader and Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television by Jean-Luc Godard. He is the author of the essay Découpage in the co-authored volume Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form; co-editor of South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography; and the author of essays on Léon Moussinac and the early film projectionist. Kevin J. Hayes is emeritus professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. He is the author of numerous books on the history of reading, including George Washington: A Life in Books, for which he received the George Washington Prize. Previous publications in cinema studies include Sam Peckinpah: Interviews; Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull; and Charlie Chaplin: Interviews. His work has been translated into numerous languages. Fredric Jameson teaches at Duke University. He is the author of more than a score of books on aesthetics, cultural theory and politics. His most recent volumes are on Walter Benjamin and Raymond Chandler. He has also written extensively on film, most recently on Robert Altman, Theo Angelopoulos, Alexei Gherman and Alexander Sokurov.

"What a pleasure! This is a new form, a new genre, distantly related, no doubt, to the journal, in which we browse in search of this or that idiosyncratic reflection of an unpredictable culture producer in off hours. . . . Insofar as all these references constitute and name random moments in the intellectual life of Godard, they offer ways, not to understand him (how could anyone possibly do that?), but rather to live a moment inside one of his thoughts, however insubstantial and ephemeral. It is a great privilege to be able to do so."?Fredic Jameson - Duke University