Inside Souvenir, the New Literary Magazine in Paris

Kyle Berlin is a Paris-based novelist, editor, and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Metropolitan Review, among other publications. He is the editor-in-chief of SOUVENIR magazine.

Augusta Sagnelli is an American photographer, creative director, and publisher. She moved to Paris in 2021 from New Orleans, where she built her commercial photography studio. She is the cofounder and creative director of SOUVENIR. 

Kyle and Augusta recently answered Janet Hulstrand’s questions about SOUVENIR, their new Paris-based literary/art magazine, which launched in November, in this interview for Bonjour Paris.

Janet: First of all, félicitations on a very exciting — and successful — launch to your magazine. How did you come up with the idea for SOUVENIR? And what kind of work will you be publishing?

Augusta: It was such a collaborative and natural beginning. After coffee one day at the Pompidou, Kyle said he wanted to start a literary magazine; I said “I’ve always wanted to make a magazine” and then the ideating never really stopped. This was in early 2025. SOUVENIR was actually a name for the fictional magazine I had dreamt up in my head two years prior to even meeting Kyle. He was really the one who took the editorial vision by the reins and established the type of writers SOUVENIR wants to publish.  

Kyle: The original idea was to bring back the spirit of the early days of the Paris Review, in the 1950s and 60s, when it was publishing some of the most exciting writers of the postwar generation, including Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, and Jack Kerouac. Every generation of Anglophone writers in Paris stretching back to the 1920s has had its own little magazine, but I looked around and didn’t see anything big and ambitious here, in English. At SOUVENIR, we publish short stories, personal essays, art portfolios, photo essays, reportage, long-form criticism, and we soon hope to start publishing some graphic novel excerpts as well. We have a large and beautiful canvas to work with, as well as an exceptional printer, so there’s a really huge focus on design, and making sure we make the most of every single page.

Janet: Backing up a bit — how, when, and where did the two of you meet? And do you both live in Paris now?

Augusta: We both live in Paris now, yes, but previously we each lived in New Orleans for about five years, but at different times; so ultimately we were connected by mutual New Orleans friends. We discovered via Substack that we were all living in Paris. Our shared interest in literature, cheap wine, art, Paris and the rest of it made us fast friends. I have always lived in the 11th, most recently in a 6th floor apartment overlooking the Père Lachaise cemetery; I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Kyle: I moved to Paris on a bit of whim in 2023, but it wasn’t until a year and a half later that I realized that Aaron Lopez-Barrantes, Augusta’s husband’s twin brother, was living in the city. Aaron and I had been good friends when we both lived in New Orleans, but I had no idea he had a twin! Samuél (Augusta’s husband) and I quickly became close friends, and through him I met Augusta.  

I had never had an interest in creating a magazine that was exclusively, or mostly, text-focused. And it became clear pretty quickly that Augusta and I had a similar taste and aesthetic. I live in the 19th arrondissement, and I have to say that moving here has been both a crazy adventure and also one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Janet: Why did you decide to make SOUVENIR a print publication? And how much of it is also available digitally? 

Augusta: We wanted SOUVENIR to endure the test of digital time and to live in the world as a physical artifact. It is evident that what people are craving more and more is to be in rooms with people exchanging ideas and speaking about their work in the greater context of our time – and an object we can hold in our hands does that much more successfully than any blog or digital platform can. That being said, all of the articles in every issue will be made available on our Substack, but only for people who subscribe yearly to the print publication.

Kyle: While most of the magazine content is paywalled, we will be rolling out online-only content soon that I think will work better on Substack. While Substack certainly celebrates long-form work, the truth is that most of the pieces that do best are those that respond to the current discourse in an immediate and visceral way, which I’m not much interested in publishing, as either a writer or editor. The only type of writing that I think will last is work that has been obsessively worked over and edited, until every single sentence shines. Many of the pieces in our first issue took months to put together — in some cases, like Phineas Rueckert’s reported piece on the 10th anniversary of the Paris terror attacks, the better part of a year. No matter how good you are as a writer, there’s a difference between a post that takes five hours, or even five days of work, and one that takes five months.

That said, I do think there are different kinds of editorial pieces that can do well that aren’t responsive to current events or whatever’s happening online. So we’ll be testing some new online-only sections, including some service journalism (like “5 Cool Things To Do In Paris Right Now”), as well as a personal essay/diary section that we’re planning to call Journal Intime, which will be on the shorter side (1,000 words or less) and hopefully will serve as a way for new writers to break into the magazine.

Janet: How Paris-centric is your focus? 

Augusta: While our team is mainly based in Paris, and therefore our editorial lens is focused from here, our content is not exclusively themed around Paris. Often, the strongest Paris thread you will find is between the contributors themselves, for whom Paris — or France — plays an important role in either their creative process, their personal story, or their interests. In almost every story you will hear mention of something or someone French, and that is not by design; rather, it happens naturally because this is the background our contributors are pulling from.

Janet: What is the submission process?

Kyle: Our submissions page, along with some basics about what we’re looking for, can be found on our website. My recommendation to artists and writers who want to publish with us is to get a copy of the magazine and spend some time looking at the work we’ve already done. Although we work with emerging artists for the most part, our editorial process is really no less rigorous than what you find at Harper’s, The New Yorker, etc. 

Janet: I understand that you have special events coming up in Paris, but also in New York and New Orleans. Are there other international cities where you will be hosting in-person events?

Kyle: We plan to have events this year in Madrid, New York, Minneapolis, London, and Barcelona. The best way to keep up with our events is through Instagram, where we’ll be posting details about each event as it arises.

Janet: Other than producing a really high-quality print publication covering the literary and visual arts, what are some of your other goals in publishing SOUVENIR? What would you love to see happen going forward? 

Augusta: The magazine is at the center of this project, but largely my goal is to develop artist residencies and workshop offerings to our network of readers and contributors. As someone who is frequently connecting with people passing through Paris, it feels like the magazine gives me a place to focus that energy and to figure out how to harness resources in a way that can strengthen this community. SOUVENIR Magazine is the archive of these connections coming to fruition; it is a document created in the name of remembering the here and now of the creative landscape of Paris and our greater networks during this time.

Kyle: My long-term goal is to establish SOUVENIR as a conduit between the Francophone and Anglophone literary worlds. I’d love, for example, to be able to publish and promote French writers in French who are not yet published in English, but should be. As I work with French writers, however, I’m starting to realize that the best way to break into the Francophone literary world would be to publish a magazine . . . in French. And while I wouldn’t feel comfortable directly running editorial in the way I do for SOUVENIR, I do hope at some point to expand our umbrella to include other publications. There’s an enormous amount of talent here in Paris, but very few places where you can publish long-form work, even in French. There isn’t (and never really was) any Parisian equivalent to the golden age of magazines in the US, with publications like Esquire and Rolling Stone, so you also don’t really have French writers in the tradition of someone like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, or even James Baldwin. In France, you tend to have either essayists or academics or novelists — narrative nonfiction as such doesn’t really exist as a distinct category.

Janet: How can readers support this publication?

Augusta: Readers can subscribe yearly, which gives us more runway to pay current subscribers. And they can sign up for our newsletter to stay informed about all of our in-person events, which will happen not only in Paris, but in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Milan and many more places to come! They can also follow us on Instagram and Substack — at @souvenirmagazineparis / souvenirmagazineparis.substack.com/