Category: Books on France

Jamie Cat Callan in her new book “French Women Don’t Sleep Alone” gives readers a personalized, guided tour through the corridors of French love. Just as we’ve learned to stop torturing ourselves with fad diets and have relearned the art of eating, this witty, insightful, and candid book strives to show American women how to cultivate and enjoy the pleasures of love, romance, and marriage. According to Callan French women believe that the gift for attracting men has nothing to do with beauty, work, or even motivation. On the contrary says Callan, French women’s love lives are romantic, sensual, playful, and intense. They conduct their relationships with the same unique sense of originality and artfulness that they choose their clothes and accessories. 

Jamie Cat Callan presents and signs her new book “French Women Don’t Sleep Alone: Pleasurable Secrets to Finding Love,” Wed. Sept 16, 7:30pm, WHSmith – 248, rue de Rivoli – 75001 Paris – M°Concorde

 

As all habitués know, Paris is a world unto itself, an endless labyrinth that never seems to exhaust the curious. No surprise then to find that there is a publisher, Editions Parigramme, that survives by producing nothing but books on the city. They’ve been doing it for more than a decade now and show no signs of slowing down; this year alone has already seen the appearance of more than twenty new titles, on topics as varied as poems about Paris, the city’s best bars/bakers/gardens/walks/restaurants, being a young mother here, design, contemporary art, excursions with small kids… Alas, for the hardened Anglophone, they are all in French, though a wonderful guide like Les Patisseries de Paris shouldn’t cause too many problems to anyone with a true love of éclairs au chocolat and palmiers and a basic grasp of the language of Molière and MC Solaar. Continue reading “Unexplored Paris”

A few streets, a few lives… this new book is half history and half a personal family autobiography, Author Gillian Tindall, a master of miniaturist history, tells ordinary stories of the ordinary lives of five generations of her family while revisiting Paris’s Latin Quarter evoking all the resonances of the Left Bank – students and artists, garrets and cafés, music halls and courtesans. Tindall’s writing makes much of an unknown person or single situation while staking out a particular territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place.

 

Author Charles Timoney recently discussed his new book  ‘A Certain…Je Ne Sais Quoi: The Ideal Guide to Sounding, Acting and Shrugging Like The French” at Smiths Paris Bookshop. Timoney, who has lived and worked in France for 25 years, told his audience that he learned quickly that his ‘O Level French’ was scarcely enough to cope with life here. He noted  “Even if you did understand what was being said, there was always that key word that you didn’t understand…and that was to say nothing of all the words that don’t mean what you think they mean in French.” Continue reading “A Certain…Je Ne Sais Quoi”

This book tells the tale of the secret wife of Louis IV, Francoise d’Aubigne, who during her lifetime managed to make her way from desperate poverty to a brilliant salon life in Paris and the centre of power at Versailles. Married at fifteen to forty-two-year-old Paul Scarron, tragically disfigured and scandalously popular poet of the burlesque, Francoise encountered in her husband’s famous salon all the brilliant, beautiful, comic and tragic characters of the seventeenth-century’s glitterati. After his death she led the life of a merry widow among her friends in the Marais quarter of Paris, before being chosen by the King’s mistress, Athenais de Montespan, as governess for her growing brood of royal batards. Leaving the pleasures of the Marais behind her, Francoise began a new life at court, first at the genteel palace of Saint-Germain, then at the King’s fabulous new folly of Versailles. Continue reading “Madame de Maintenon”

What is the best way to get under the skin of a city such as Paris?  Heather Reyes, editor  of a new anthology of writing on the city, says it is through reading what people have had to say about it. Continue reading “City-lit Paris”

This latest installment to James H. S. McGregor’s “Ground Up” series paints a portrait of Paris in all of its monochrome nuances. The author illuminates the many faces of Paris-medievalist, modernist, expatriate, artist, romantic and  revolutionary-while recalling the unique history of the City of Light. Continue reading “Paris From The Ground Up”

Unleash your inner Gaul with this book which is both hilarious and helpful. “Pardon My French” is an entertaining and useful guide to the words and phrases every Francophile, traveler, student, and word maven should know, with fascinating lore and tidbits that make sense of the Gallic mind-set. Continue reading “Pardon my French”

This book by James R. Gaines tells the story of the French and American Revolutions in a single, thrilling narrative that shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were. Their leaders were often seen as father and son, but the relationship of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, while close, was every bit as complex as the long, fraught history of the French-American alliance, of which they were also the founding fathers.

 

Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood. 

But he soon discovered it’s a different world en France. Continue reading “The Sweet Life in Paris”

Just in time for Paris’ celebration of  the 120th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower  is a new book by Jill Jonnes which tells the story of the world-famous monument and the extraordinary world’s fair that introduced it.

Since it opened in May 1889, the Eiffel Tower has been an iconic image of modern times-as much a beacon of technological progress as an enduring symbol of Paris and French culture. But as engineer Gustave Eiffel built the now-famous landmark to be the spectacular centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair, he stirred up a storm of vitriol from Parisian tastemakers, lawsuits, and predictions of certain structural calamity.

In Eiffel’s Tower, Jill Jonnes   combines technological and social history to create a richly textured portrayal of an age of aspiration, dreams and progress. It is a compelling account of the tower’s creation and a superb portrait of Belle Epoque France.