Exposed


Jean-Philippe Blondel - 2019
    This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait. Possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives. Blondel, author of the hugely popular novel The 6:41 to Paris, evokes an intimacy of dangerous intensity in a tale marked by profound nostalgia and a reckoning with the past that allows its two characters to move ahead in to the future.

A Jacques Barzun Reader


Jacques Barzun - 2001
    With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

Hemingway's Paris: A User's Guide (Kindle Single)


John Baxter - 2016
     What was Paris to Hemingway, and he to Paris? And how much of his city survives for us to visit and explore? In Hemingway's Paris: A User's Guide, prize-winning author John Baxter (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World) evokes the French capital as it was between 1921 and 1926, when Hemingway lived there, and provides a unique insider's guide to the city he knew and loved. John Baxter was born in Australia, but has lived in Paris for 25 years, most of that time in the building which Sylvia Beach made her home while running the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop. As well as writing extensively about the city and its history, he leads literary walks around sites associated with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. More details on www.johnbaxterparis.com.

My Body and I


René Crevel - 1925
    Exploring the tension between body and spirit, Crevel’s meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry, truth, and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator’s Romantic mind moves from evocative tales and sensations to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. A Surrealist Proust.

Last Nights of Paris


Philippe Soupault - 1928
    The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself... and in Williams' wonderfully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A vivid portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the 20's, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between the literary circles at the root of both French and American Modernism.

The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas


Gustave Flaubert - 1913
    After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as a Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, the Dictionnaire was long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each “accepted idea” Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirist’s wit and a scholar’s precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.

Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks


Diana Souhami - 2004
    They met in Paris in 1915, and their relationship lasted more than fifty years despite infidelity, separation, and temperamental differences.Told by Diana Souhami, the critically acclaimed author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Wild Girls is the story of two audacious women and the world they inhabited.Natalie Barney believed that living was "the first of all arts." She published memoirs and collections of poems and aphorisms, but her passion was for seduction and love. She liked lavish displays, lots of sex, and love unbounded by rules. At her Friday afternoon salons, in the Grecian Temple of Friendship in the garden of her Paris home, "one met lesbians." Lovers and friends circled the Amazon, as she was called. She aspired to make her temple the Sapphic center of the western world.Romaine Brooks's prime interests, on the other hand, were herself and her painting. She produced many self-portraits and portraits of her own and Natalie's lovers and friends. She endured an unhappy childhood and a fraught relationship with her mother. She trusted no one but Natalie.Natalie and Romaine are at the center of this "Sapphic Idyll." Included, too, are their lovers and friends before and after they met: Liane de Pougy, the exquisite courtesan and lover of princes; Renee Vivien, poet of melancholy and death, who died of anorexia at age thirty-two; Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, who ran up huge bills and died of a drug overdose; the prima ballerina Ida Rubinstein; the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio - and many others.Natalie's salon, attended by Gertrude Stein, and Colette and Edith Sitwell, was a magnet for social introductions and cultural innovations. Drawing from letters, papers, and paintings, Diana Souhami re-creates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women.

Design Bloggers at Home: Fresh interiors inspiration from leading on-line trend setters


Ellie Tennant - 2014
    A global network of creative, interior design bloggers has emerged, publishing fresh and inspiring content online every day.With diverse backgrounds and lifestyles, these individual bloggers combine to create a thriving online community of trendsetters and style gurus. The digital world brings with it design democracy; with the freedom to publish whatever they want, whenever they want and unhampered by the restrictions of larger corporate websites, these design bloggers offer a beguiling alternative to traditional media and have become an important source of inspiration and information for the homes enthusiast. In her first book, leading interiors journalist and stylist Ellie Tennant meets the characters and creative forces behind leading design blogs, exploring their online realms, their beautiful homes and their clever styling ideas. Thirteen in-depth case studies cover a panorama of cutting edge bloggers’ spaces—from a pared-back monochrome cabin in Scandinavia to a maximalist, color-filled apartment in California—while the final chapter offers advice on setting up your own design blog. The result is a coffee table tome to treasure—a visual feast of inspiring yet achievable interiors—with plenty of ideas to steal for your own home.

Paris


Julian Green - 1983
    Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1940, describing chestnut trees lit up at night like 'Japanese lanterns' or lamenting the passing of street cries and old buildings, his book is filled with unforgettable imagery. It is a meditation on getting lost and wasting time, and on what it truly means to know a city.

The Last Great Fight: The Extraordinary Tale of Two Men and How One Fight Changed Their Lives Forever


Joe Layden - 2007
    This is a compelling tale of shattered dreams and, ultimately, redemption.

Senior Season


Tom Perrotta - 2011
    Clay wouldn't have said his life was defined by his place on the high school football team's roster, but when he's sidelined by injury, everything, including his sense of self, seems different. And it's not just that his concussion was bad enough to cause his parents and doctors to worry, to make him have trouble concentrating. It's that he's seeing the previously familiar people in his world—from his girlfriend Megan to his geriatric neighbor Mrs. Scotto—from a new perspective. Perrotta's warmth and ability to describe the dramatic moments in the average lives of characters of every age are perfectly presented in "Senior Season", a story that will add a layer to fans' pleasure in this author's themes and concerns. This e-book also includes an excerpt of THE LEFTOVERS.

To Paint Is To Love Again


Henry Miller - 1960
    

The Production of Space


Henri Lefebvre - 1991
    His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

The Theater and Its Double


Antonin Artaud - 1938
    

Pearl in the Sand, Sampler


Tessa Afshar - 2013
    Pearl in the Sand tells Rahab's untold story. Rahab lives in a wall; her house is built into the defensive walls of the City of Jericho. Other walls surround her as well-walls of fear, rejection, and unworthiness. A woman with a wrecked past; a man of success, of faith...of pride. A marriage only God would conceive! Through the heartaches of a stormy relationship, Rahab and Salmone learn the true source of one another's worth and find healing in God.