belles-lettres

Crossing the line between belles-lettres and pulp, Petry was a pioneer of the literary thriller, a genre popularised by her contemporary Patricia Highsmith.

“Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent,” Chekhov once wrote to his publisher, adding that they share “identical goals and an identical enemy—the Devil.”

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what separates a mere commentator from a producer of belles-lettres, but you know it when you read it.

More recently in Carmel there have been a great number of literary men about, but there is not the old flavor, the old dignity of the true belles-lettres.

The moment of maximum strain in the discussion of the Dead Sea documents may, perhaps, be fixed on the day—May 26, 1950—when Professor Dupont-Sommer read before the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres a paper on the Habakkuk Commentary.