Paris: the city where romance, good food and great literature go hand in hand. A temporary and permanent home for some of the most celebrated writers of our time, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald to Hugo and Flaubert. Not every writer has the ability to do justice to the physical beauty and remarkable character of Paris, but our selections do the job as well as can be done.
Ernest Hemingway's enthralling memoir of his time in Paris as a member of the "Lost Generation," including vignettes of other great artists like Fitzgerald and Dali, along with delicious details of life in Paris circa the 1920s.
Buy From Local BookstoreThe authoritative history of modern Paris from the Revolution to the present day, as told through the astonishing and true stories from some of its most fascinating inhabitants: Baudelaire, the real-life Mimi of La Boheme, Marcel Proust and more. As the biographer of eminent Parisians like Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud, Graham Robb is perhaps the English-language writer best suited to exploring the great characters of Paris and Paris itself.
Buy From Local BookstoreSome may not know that Victor Hugo wrote the Hunchback of Notre Dame as a means of convincing the public to appreciate and protect the medieval architecture of Paris, which was threatened in the early 1800s by Parisian construction magnates and public officials who sought to rebuild the city in a more modern style. In addition to its status as the one of the great classics of early modern European literature, this unabridged version of Hunchback of Notre Dame contains beautiful descriptions of the cathedral and its surrounding architecture. Hugo's care in describing the built environment that he loved is summed up in this quote toward the end of the book: "There exists in this era, for thoughts written in stone, a privilege absolutely comparable to our current freedom of the press. It is the freedom of architecture." Walking around Paris would be a far different experience today without this book, and it's worth reading for that reason alone.
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