Author: Carolyn Campbell
Publisher: Goff Books
ISBN: 9781943532292
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
This first-person account of a legendary necropolis will delight Francophiles, tourists and armchair travelers, while enriching the experience of taphophiles (cemetery lovers) and aficionados of art and architecture, mystery and romance. Carolyn Campbell's evocative images are complemented by those of renowned landscape photographer Joe Cornish. "City of Immortals" celebrates the novelty and eccentricity of Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the engrossing story of the history of the site established by Napoleonic decree along with portraits of the last moments of the cultural icons buried within its walls. In addition to several "conversations" with some of the high-profile residents, three guided tours are provided along with an illustrated pull-out map featuring the grave sites of eighty-four architects, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and actors, including Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison of the Doors. Frédéric Chopin, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Isadora Duncan, Eugène Delacroix, Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret, Colette and Marcel Proust.
Author: David Burke
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458759067
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Get Book Here
Book Description
No city has attracted so much literary talent, launched so many illustrious careers, or produced such a wealth of enduring literature as Paris. From the 15th century through the 20th, poets, novelists, and playwrights, famed for both their work an...
Author: Bill Richardson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 146686611X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Paris's Pere-Lachaise cemetery lie the bones of many renowned departed. It is also home to a large number of stray cats. Now, what if by some strange twist of fate, the souls of the famous were reborn in the cats with their personalities intact? There's Maria Callas, a willful and imperious diva, wailing late into the night. Earthy, bawdy chanteuse Edith Piaf is a foul-mouthed washerwoman. Oscar Wilde is hopelessly in love with Jim Morrison, who sadly does not return his affections. Frederic Chopin is as melancholic and deeply contemplative as ever, and in honor of the tradition of leaving love letters at his tomb, he is now the cemetery's postmaster general. Last but not least, Marcel Proust is trying to solve the mystery behind some unusual thefts - someone has stolen Rossini's glass eye and Sarah Bernhardt's leg. Told in a series of amusing set pieces and intercepted letters, this is a delicious tale of intrigue, unrequited love, longstanding quarrels, character assassinations, petty spats, and sorcery that builds to a steady climax at the cats' annual Christmas pageant.
Author: Claude Izner
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142991890X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fin de siècle Paris: the world of Verlaine and Zola, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec; a time of anarchists, scientists, and occultists, when can-can skirts were raised at the Moulin Rouge and fortunes were lost on the Panama Canal. Armand de Valois was one of these latter unfortunates, stricken by yellow fever at the site of his ruin. When his widow Odette disappears into his tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery and never returns, her maid Denise fears the worst. Alone in the great metropolis, Denise knows just one person she can go to for help: Odette's former lover, Victor Legris. When the frightened girl turns up at his bookshop, Victor feels there must be a simple explanation for Odette's disappearance. But it soon becomes apparent that something sinister lies behind events at the Père-Lachaise. When Denise turns up drowned in the Seine, and Odette's corpse is found buried in an overgrown backyard, Victor throws himself into his second investigation, aided by his trusty assistant Joseph and much to his lover Tasha's chagrin. Once again, Paris and its denizens come alive, and events of world and local history give the mystery a thrilling backdrop. From the the Bois de Vincennes to the streets of Saint-Germain, from trams to carriages, from artists' lofts to coffee bars, diligently researched and tightly plotted, The Disappearance at Père-Lachaise immerses readers in a fascinating mystery in the glorious City of Light.
Author: Erin-Marie Legacey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book Here
Book Description
The dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial culture emerged in Paris as a result of both revolutionary fervor and public health concerns, resulting in the construction of park-like cemeteries on the outskirts of the city and a vast underground ossuary. Making Space for the Dead describes how revolutionaries placed the dead at the center of their republican project of radical reinvention of French society and envisioned a future where graveyards would do more than safely contain human remains; they would serve to educate and inspire the living. Legacey unearths the unexpectedly lively process by which burial sites were reimagined, built, and used, focusing on three of the most important of these new spaces: the Paris Catacombs, Père Lachaise cemetery, and the short-lived Museum of French Monuments. By situating discussions of death and memory in the nation's broader cultural and political context, as well as highlighting how ordinary Parisians understood and experienced these sites, she shows how the treatment of the dead became central to the reconstruction of Parisian society after the Revolution.
Author: Oliver Gee
Publisher: Earful Tower Publishing
ISBN: 9781098301996
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
Join award-winning podcaster Oliver Gee on this laugh-out-loud journey through the streets of Paris. He tells of how five years in France have taught him how to order cheese, make a Parisian person smile, and convince anyone you can fake French (even if, like Oliver, you speak the language like an Australian cow). A fresh voice on the Paris scene, he shares the soaring highs and crushing lows that come with following your dreams to the French capital. He also befriends the city's too-cool-for-school basketballers, chases runaway crocodiles, and goes on a mammoth honeymoon trip around France on his little red scooter.
Author: Susan Cahill
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250074320
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Get Book Here
Book Description
For the seasoned Parisian traveller or the novice looking to get off the beaten track Cahill provides a roadmap to parts of the city most visitors will never seeIn a city that is the destination of millions of travelers every year, it can be difficult to find your way to its lovely, serene spaces. Away from the madding crowds, the gardens of Paris offer the balm of flowers, tall old trees, fountains, ponds, sculptures, with quiet Parisians reading Le Monde, taking the sun, relishing the peace. These places are often tucked away, off the beaten tourist track, and without a guide they're easy to miss: The Jardin de l'Atlantique, out of sight on the roof of Gare Montparnasse. The enchanting Jardin de la Vallee Suisse, invisible from the street, accessible only if you know how to find the path. The Square Boucicaut, its children's carousel hidden inside a grove of oak and maples. Square Batignolles, the shade of the old chestnut trees an inspiration to the painter edouard Manet and poet Paul Verlaine. Hidden Gardens of Paris features 40 such oases in quartiers both posh and plain, as well as dozens of others Nearby to the featured green space. It is arranged according to the geographic sections of the city Ile de la Cite, Left Bank, Right Bank, Western Paris, Eastern Paris a lively and informative guide that focuses on each place as a site of passionate cultural memory.
Author: Jules Romains
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Get Book Here
Book Description
The subject of this modern classic is not a man. "It is an event," says Jules Romains, who is considered "the French Dos Passos." The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into "a great soul that cannot die." The event expresses Romains's belief in "collective beings," the famous theory of "Unanimism." In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion-picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty-seven-volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which André Maurois calls "the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac."
Author: David Downie
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466841257
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book Here
Book Description
"A top-notch walking tour of Paris. . . . The author's encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its artists grants him a mystical gift of access: doors left ajar and carriage gates left open foster his search for the city's magical story. Anyone who loves Paris will adore this joyful book. Readers visiting the city are advised to take it with them to discover countless new experiences." —Kirkus Reviews (starred) A unique combination of memoir, history, and travelogue, this is author David Downie's irreverent quest to uncover why Paris is the world's most romantic city—and has been for over 150 years. Abounding in secluded, atmospheric parks, artists' studios, cafes, restaurants and streets little changed since the 1800s, Paris exudes romance. The art and architecture, the cityscape, riverbanks, and the unparalleled quality of daily life are part of the equation. But the city's allure derives equally from hidden sources: querulous inhabitants, a bizarre culture of heroic negativity, and a rich historical past supplying enigmas, pleasures and challenges. Rarely do visitors suspect the glamor and chic and the carefree atmosphere of the City of Light grew from and still feed off the dark fountainheads of riot, rebellion, mayhem and melancholy—and the subversive literature, art and music of the Romantic Age. Weaving together his own with the lives and loves of Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, Nadar and other great Romantics Downie delights in the city's secular romantic pilgrimage sites asking , Why Paris, not Venice or Rome—the tap root of "romance"—or Berlin, Vienna and London—where the earliest Romantics built castles-in-the-air and sang odes to nightingales? Read A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light and find out.
Author: Patrice Nganang
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374719306
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book Here
Book Description
The second volume in a magisterial trilogy, the story of Cameroon caught between empires during World War II In Cameroon, plum season is a highly anticipated time of year. But for the narrator of When the Plums Are Ripe, the poet Pouka, the season reminds him of the “time when our country had discovered the root not so much of its own violence as that of the world’s own, and, in response, had thrown its sons who at that time were called Senegalese infantrymen into the desert, just as in the evenings the sellers throw all their still-unsold plums into the embers.” In this novel of radiant lyricism, Patrice Nganang recounts the story of Cameroon’s forced entry into World War II, and in the process complicates our own understanding of that globe-spanning conflict. After the fall of France in 1940, Cameroon found itself caught between Vichy and the Free French at a time when growing nationalism advised allegiance to neither regime, and was ultimately dragged into fighting throughout North Africa on behalf of the Allies. Moving from Pouka’s story to the campaigns of the French general Leclerc and the battles of Kufra and Murzuk, Nganang questions the colonial record and recenters African perspectives at the heart of Cameroon’s national history, all the while writing with wit and panache. When the Plums Are Ripe is a brilliantly crafted, politically charged epic that challenges not only the legacies of colonialism but the intersections of language, authority, and history itself.
