Parisian SketchesPaperback, 15 October 2014

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, J.-K. Huysmans' Parisian Sketches shares with these vibrant Impressionist works a fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the Opera Garnier and the Folies-Bergeres. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable to do so, Parisian Sketches is an all-out assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed impressions - of cafe concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny 'City of Light'- Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris of the bal masque and the cancan, the brasseries à femme and the buveurs d'absinthe, all captured with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.