Paris Stories gathers classic stories about the City of Light by a
wide range of writers across four centuries.
Perhaps no other European city has so captured the imagination of the
artistically and romantically minded. Laurence Sterne explores the
temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores,
and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eyewitness account of the horrors
and glories of the French Revolution. Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola
offer fascinating portraits of the growing metropolis's teeming
humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle its glittering literary
circles; and Huysmans describes a memorable evening at the Folies
Bergère. Colette recounts the sensual adventures of a young girl in the
decadent Paris of the early twentieth century, while F. Scott Fitzgerald
revels in its urban glamour. Jean Rhys's lost heroines wander from café
to café, James Baldwin celebrates the city's sexual freedoms, and
Raymond Queneau gleefully reinvents the language of the street. In more
recent decades, Michel Tournier's North African immigrant walks a camel
along the boulevards and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano nostalgically
maps the famed Parisian arrondissements. Theatrical and elegant, seamy
and intellectual, Paris has never lost its alluring power, richly evoked
in these compelling and seductive tales.
