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Author: John von Sothen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224846
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.
Author: John von Sothen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224846
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.
Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 0316073652
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up; frequently I was helpless. The New York Times Book Review on Naked
Author: Brooke L. Blower
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199792771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary politics of the United States. In this bold and original study, Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth. She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be American in the new century, even as they came up against conflicting interpretations of American power by others. Interwar Paris may have been a capital of the arts, notorious for its pleasures, but it was also smoldering with radical and reactionary plots, suffused with noise, filth, and chaos, teeming with immigrants and refugees, communist rioters, fascism admirers, overzealous police, and obnoxious tourists. Sketching Americans' place in this evocative landscape, Blower shows how arrivals were drawn into the capital's battles, both wittingly and unwittingly. Americans in Paris found themselves on the front lines of an emerging culture of political engagements-a transatlantic matrix of causes and connections, which encompassed debates about "Americanization" and "anti-American" protests during the Sacco-Vanzetti affair as well as a host of other international incidents. Blower carefully depicts how these controversies and a backdrop of polarized European politics honed Americans' political stances and sense of national distinctiveness. A model of urban, transnational history, Becoming Americans in Paris offers a nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern American political culture.
Author: William Howard Adams
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300082616
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
An illustrated study brings to life the atmosphere and personalities of pre-revolutionary Paris, traces their influence on the American envoy, and recounts his participation in the life of the city and its intrigues at court. UP.
Author: Eloisa James
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1857889223
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
After years of living vicariously through the heroines in her novels, bestselling author Eloisa James takes a leap that most of us can only daydream about. She sells her house, leaves her job as a Shakespeare professor, and packs her husband and two protesting children off to Paris. Grand plans are abandoned as she falls under the spell of daily life as a Parisienne — exquisite food, long walks by the seine, reading in bed, displays of effortless chic around every corner, and being reminded of what really matters in a place where people seem to kiss all the time. Against one of the world’s most picturesque backdrops, she copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools — not to mention puberty — in a foreign language; and her formidable mother-in-law, marina, who believes dogs should be fed prosciutto and wives should live in the kitchen. An irresistible love letter to a city that will make you want to head there, Paris in Love is also a joyful testament to the pleasures of savouring life.
Author: Adam Gopnik
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1849168431
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
In 1995, Adam Gopnik and his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York for the urbane glamour of Paris. Charmed by the beauties of the city, Gopnik set out to experience for himself the spirit and romance that has so captivated American writers throughout the Twentieth century. In the grand tradition of Stein and Hemingway, Gopnik planned to walk the paths of the Tuilleries, to enjoy philosophical discussion in cafes in short, to lead the fabled life of an American in Paris. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved 'Paris Journals' in the New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with everyday, not so fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals precede middle-of-the night baby feedings; afternoons are filled with trips to the Musee d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers are eaten while three star chefs debate a 'culinary crisis'. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik manages to weave the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful book.
Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101052511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
The story of the world-famous monument and the extraordinary world’s fair that introduced it, by the author of Conquering Gotham and Urban Forests In this first general history of the Eiffel Tower in English, Jill Jonnes-acclaimed author of Conquering Gotham-offers an eye- opening look not only at the construction of one of the modern world's most iconic structures, but also the epochal event that surrounded its arrival as a wonder of the world. In this marvelously entertaining portrait of Belle Époque France, fear and loathing over Eiffel's brash design share the spotlight with the celebrities that made the 1889 Exposition Universelle an event to remember-including Buffalo Bill and his sharpshooter Annie Oakley, Thomas Edison, and artists Whistler, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Eiffel's Tower is a richly textured portrait of an era at the dawn of modernity, reveling in the limitless promise of the future.
Author: Jean Paul Carlhian
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN: 0847843408
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
"This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of the seminal early work of a century of American architects--including Richard Morris Hunt, H. H. Richardson, Raymond Hood, and Charles Follen McKim--who studied at the prestigious and influential École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, before going on to design and build many of this nation's most important buildings and monuments."--Cover, page [4].
Author: Siobhan Curham
Publisher: Bookouture
ISBN: 9781800190115
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Paris, 1940: Walking through Montmartre that morning was like the eerie calm right before a storm. The roads were deserted. We carried on, arm in arm, and then finally, we saw them. Columns and columns of soldiers, spreading through the streets like a toxic grey vapour. 'You must write about this, ' he whispered to me. 'You must write about the day freedom left Paris.' As Nazi troops occupy the City of Lights, American journalist Florence is determined to do everything she can to save her adopted home and the man she loves. Florence had arrived in Paris in 1937 and on a beautiful summer's day, met and fell in love with Otto, a Jewish artist from Austria, who had fled persecution in his homeland. But as swastikas are draped along the city's wide boulevards, everything Otto was running from seems to have caught up with him. Both Florence and Otto begin lending their talents to the Resistance, working to sabotage the Germans right under their noses. Florence's society columns that, before the war were filled with tales of glamorous Parisian parties, now document life under occupation and hide coded messages for those fighting outside France for freedom. While Otto risks arrest in order to pin up the anti-Nazi posters he designs by candlelight in their tiny apartment. But with every passing day, things become more dangerous for Otto to remain in Paris. If Florence risks everything by accepting a secret mission, can she ensure his survival so that they can be reunited once the war is over? A sweeping wartime story that will capture your heart and never let it go. Fans of The Alice Network, The Lost Girls of Paris and My Name is Eva will be absolutely gripped from the very first page. Readers LOVE An American in Paris 'An enthralling story that puts readers in the middle of the chaos surrounding World War Two... Grabs readers from the beginning and won't let them go until they finish the last page... I loved absolutely everything about this novel and won't hesitate to claim it as my favourite historical fiction read of 2020.' Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Denise Grover Swank
Publisher: Blink
ISBN: 0310755328
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
New York Times bestseller! In this romantic coming-of-age YA novel, Sophie Brooks agrees to spend the summer with her father and his soon-to-be new wife, as well as share a room with her stepmom's daughter, Camille. But what should be a lovely time in the City of Lights, preparing for her audition at the prestigious French music academy she's dreamed of attending, becomes a nightmare due to the lack of a piano and less than sisterly relations … until the attractive boy next door invites Sophie to practice at his home. But just as everything is looking up, Sophie's first love--and musical future--are in danger. One Paris Summer: Is a perfect escape read for teens and fans of contemporary YA romance Combines the complexities of blended families and finding your own path in life with the thrills of falling in love for the first time Will appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen, Jenny Han, and Stephanie Perkins
