If you’re anything like me, you barely give Paris’ bouquinistes a passing glance if you happen to be strolling along the Seine. Assuming that they are selling overpriced art nouveau posters and street sign magnets to tourists, you keep your eyes forward, and may even cross the street to avoid the hassle of dodging the [...]

I read Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay in one sitting finishing after midnight and much too keyed up to go to bed. de Rosnay presents two intertwined stories, one of Sarah, a young girl among the thousands of Jews who were rounded up by the French police on July 16, 1942, and the other, an American journalist [...]

It “exudes a youthful energy that promises to make Paris an even more exciting place.” The new coffeetable book Shop Image Graphics in Paris is describing Point WC, a public toilet that has its own online shop of chic accessories, such as black toilet paper. The book captures what every lover of Paris knows: the [...]

 
Late in the first act of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George,” about the painting of Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday Afternoon the Island of La Grande Jatte, as they sit in the park on the eponymous island, Seurat’s mother says to her son: “What’s that? Off in the distance?” A tower, he tells her; [...]

 
One of my clients sent me an article about a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that came out released today. Writer and editor Sean Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, took on restoring his grandfather’s original manuscript after his uncle Patrick suggested he re-examine them. He discovered that Mary, Ernest’s wife and his godmother, had [...]

 
Amphibious Andromeda is like taking a walk through the artist’s mind as he walks through Paris.  Think of it as an Accidental Tourist Guide to Paris.
What he calls a “journal of everyday life,” kept between July 24 and October 20th of 2007, Ricardo Bloch disassembles and reconfigures a unique daily walk through his Paris world in Amphibious Andromeda. Visually [...]

“A tribute so pleasant and persuasive that swarming tourists may make it difficult for Fitch and Tulka to find a table,” says the Kirkus Review about Paris artist Rick Tulka’s new book of portraits produced at Le Sélect, one of the most famous cafés in Paris, and a beacon for Americans on the Left Bank. Tulka can [...]

I’ll never forget the time I brought one of the editors of Allure magazine to a secondhand shop. She looked around at the clothing tightly packed on racks, sorted by color and garment category rather than by designer or trend. She was lost. “How do you…do this?” she asked. I was already halfway buried in [...]

Last-minute Christmas shopping list for the Francophiles in your life:
 
For the one who longs for the South (of France, of course)

Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France, by Mary Ann Caws
A very sweet memoir of cabanon life in the Vaucluse, of Caws’s friendship with the poet René Char, of cave picnics and dinner parties, [...]

For my eleventh or twelfth birthday, my parents gave me a cassette tape recording of the musical “Les Miserables.” One of the consequences was that I checked out Victor Hugo’s novel in English from the local library, and when I finished reading it, set about writing a sequel in which Gavroche didn’t really die, nor [...]