Paris in the Present Tense
Paris in the Present Tense

Author: Mark Helprin

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1468314777

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Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.

Bricktop's Paris
Bricktop's Paris

Author: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2015-01-31

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 143845502X

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2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Longlisted for the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award During the Jazz Age, France became a place where an African American woman could realize personal freedom and creativity, in narrative or in performance, in clay or on canvas, in life and in love. These women were participants in the life of the American expatriate colony, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Cole Porter, and they commingled with bohemian avant-garde writers and artists like Picasso, Breton, Colette, and Matisse. Bricktop's Paris introduces the reader to twenty-five of these women and the city they encountered. Following this nonfiction account, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting provides a fictionalized autobiography of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, which brings the players from the world of nonfiction into a Paris whose elegance masks a thriving underworld.

The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris
The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris

Author: Bronislaw Geremek

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-04-27

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9780521026123

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This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society. Professor Geremek examines the various groups which made up the marginal world - beggars, prostitutes, procuresses and pimps, petty criminals, casual workers and the unemployed - their haunts in and around Paris, their way of life, and their relation to 'normal' society. Professor Geremek has made with this book a major contribution to the study of late medieval society which illuminates the little-known area of the medieval underworld in a fascinating and very accessible manner. Translated by Jean Birrell from the French edition of 1976, this edition includes a new introduction by Jean-Claude Schmitt, which offers a frank appraisal of the author's life and career to date.

Shadows of Revolution
Shadows of Revolution

Author: David Avrom Bell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0190262680

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One of the greatest historians of French history reflects on the ways that the French Revolution continues to resonate in France and throughout the world.

Seven Ages of Paris
Seven Ages of Paris

Author: Alistair Horne

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-11-20

Total Pages: 833

ISBN-13: 0804151695

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In this luminous portrait of Paris, the celebrated historian gives us the history, culture, disasters, and triumphs of one of the world’s truly great cities. While Paris may be many things, it is never boring. From the rise of Philippe Auguste through the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIV (who abandoned Paris for Versailles); Napoleon’s rise and fall; Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris (at the cost of much of the medieval city); the Belle Epoque and the Great War that brought it to an end; the Nazi Occupation, the Liberation, and the postwar period dominated by de Gaulle--Horne brings the city’s highs and lows, savagery and sophistication, and heroes and villains splendidly to life. With a keen eye for the telling anecdote and pivotal moment, he portrays an array of vivid incidents to show us how Paris endures through each age, is altered but always emerges more brilliant and beautiful than ever. The Seven Ages of Paris is a great historian’s tribute to a city he loves and has spent a lifetime learning to know. "Knowledgeable and colorful, written with gusto and love.... [An] ambitious and skillful narrative that covers the history of Paris with considerable brio and fervor." —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW