Book picks similar to
Paris by Julien Green
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I'll Always Have Paris
Art Buchwald - 1996
. . . A GREAT READ."--Larry King, USA TodayIn 1948, an American innocent named Art Buchwald set sail for Paris, France, determined to crash Hemingway's moveable feast and make himself famous. What's more, he did it.Now he remembers those golden years--when he wrote for the Paris Herald Tribune, fell in love, spoofed Hemingway, dined with gangsters, and crashed costume balls in Venice. Everything that has made Buchwald one of the world's best-loved writers is in this funny, enchanting, poignant book. "HONEST AND MOVING . . . A CONSUMMATE STORYTELLER."--The New York Times Book Review"ROLLICKING . . . The book gallops and gambols along. . . . Buchwald is a master of the anecdote."--The Baltimore Sun
Paris to the Moon
Adam Gopnik - 2000
The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans.In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive.So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis."As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation - I did anyway - even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."
Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
Marcel Proust - 1919
Scott Moncrieff from an early and unreliable French edition, Proust’s masterpiece has now been flawlessly translated by Terence Kilmartin in this acclaimed version.
Riding the Iron Rooster
Paul Theroux - 1988
Here is China by rail, as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of one of the most intrepid and insightful travel writers of our time.
Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels For A New Life In Rural France
Karen Wheeler - 2009
But when her 'plus one' leaves, she wonders if there is more to life. So, she hangs up her Manolos & waves goodbye to the city, deciding to go it alone in a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, western France.
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong
Jean-Benoît Nadeau - 2003
Decrypting French ideas about land, privacy and language, Nadeau and Barlow weave together the threads of French society--from centralization and the Napoleonic Code to elite education and even street protests--giving us, for the first time, a complete picture of the French.
We'll Always Have Paris: Sex & Love in the City of Light
John Baxter - 2005
The seductive lure of Paris has long been irresistible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life. Globe-trotting film critic and writer John Baxter heard her siren song and was bewitched. Now he offers readers a witty, audacious, scandalous behind-the-scenes excursion into the colorful all-night show that is Paris -- interweaving his own experience of falling in love, with a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary cafés of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls.
Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974
Werner Herzog - 1978
During this monumental odyssey through a seemingly endless blizzard, Herzog documented everything he saw and felt with intense sincerity. This diary is dotted with rants about the extreme cold and utter loneliness, poetic descriptions of the snowy countryside, along with personal philosophizing. What is most remarkable is that the reading of this book flows with the experience of watching his films: through this walk we witness how his images are born. Although he received a literary award for it, this introspective masterpiece has lingered out of print since 1979. Beautifully designed and emotionally impressive, Of Walking in Ice is the first in a color-coded series of remarkable yet long-forgotten titles being republished by Free Association.
Paris 1928 (Nexus II)
Henry Miller - 2012
A rough draft that Miller ultimately abandoned, the story describes Miller's first wondrous glimpse of Paris and underscores several of the recurrent themes of his work. These previously unpublished memoirs capture Miller's troubled relationship with his second wife, June; reflections on what he left behind in New York's sweltering summer of 1927; and the anticipation of all that awaits him in Europe. Paris 1928 presents Miller's views on Europe on the brink of great changes, counterpointed by his own personal sexual revelry and freedom of choice. Illustrations in this edition are by Australian artist and filmmaker Garry Shead.
Brendan Behan's New York
Brendan Behan - 1964
So the Foreign Born Irishman, Brendan Behan, takes on his last tour of what he calls "the most exciting city in the world." His anthropological investigations cover a wide variety of places, people and things, always accompanied by ribald anecdote and rumbustious description. Whether he is buying a paper off an old lady in Harlem, swimming in the baths at the Young Men's Hebrew Association, visiting a bum on the Bowery, or having a jar with "one of his own" in an Irish saloon on Third Avenue, he has always an eye for the color of the situation and the wit to express it. Neither the serious nor the absurd are secure from his investigations, and the sacred cows fall happily. From the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village to Costello's on Third Avenue, from Mott Street in Chinatown to the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street, Brendan Behan traces an erratic path about the city, encountering such luminaries as Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William O. Douglas and Leonard Lyons - telling a tale here, embroidering an anecdote there and always passing the time of day after his own inimitable fashion. The spirit of the text is brilliantly complemented by Paul Hogarth, whose drawings evoke a nostalgia for the known and not so well-known features of the "melting pot of the world," and continue the partnership which proved to be so successful in Brendan Behan's Island.
My Last Sigh
Luis Buñuel - 1982
This long out-of-paint autobiography provides insight into the genesis of Bunuel's films and conveys his frank opinions on dwarves, Catholicism, the Marquis de Sade, food, and smoking, not to mention his recipe for a good dry martini!
Sagan, Paris 1954
Anne Berest - 2014
We encounter Françoise, her family and friends close-up, in a post-war world that is changing radically; and Mlle Quoirez, in her new guise of Françoise Sagan, will be at the heart of that social change.Anne Berest was writing her third novel when Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, asked her to write a book to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Bonjour Tristesse.
Prisoner of Love
Jean Genet - 1982
Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire, at the heart of the contemporary world.
Another Day of Life
Ryszard Kapuściński - 1976
In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his account, Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe and to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions.
Every Frenchman Has One
Olivia de Havilland - 1962
She married a Frenchman, took on all his compatriots, and has been the heroine of a love affair ever since. Her skirmishes with French traffic, French maids, French salesladies, French holidays, French law, French doctors, above all, the French language, are here set forth in a delightful and amusing record. Paraphrasing Caesar, Miss de Havilland says, "I came, I saw, I was conquered."