L’Esprit was founded in February 2022, the centenary month of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. The journal was thus born in celebration of the literary revolution of consciousness represented by High Modernism, and seeks to publish work in that spirit. L’Esprit searches for fearless, audacious, innovative writing that takes risks at the sentence level and immerses itself in the slippery, wondrous underworld of the mind. Interior-focused, character-driven, language-first work is core to our aesthetic principles, writing that eschews convention and experiments at both the technical and formal levels. L’Esprit is entirely nonprofit. All funds go towards paying our contributors. The journal is a labor of literary expression, with a goal of championing the most fearless, unconventional, risk-adept writing we can find. L’Esprit’s motto, in medium mentem, is borrowed with great admiration from Dorrit Cohn’s seminal study of rendering consciousness in fiction, Transparent Minds.