An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of Paris

In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnes Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary

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In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population,...

Memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City's cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s.

Harry Crosby was the godson of J.P. Morgan, a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and member of the Lost Generation. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life, single-minded in his devotion to the creation and destruction inherent in art. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation:...

Twelve autobiographical writings published by Italo Calvino in different books, one unpublished piece "American diary" and one work never published in Italy but printed in Lugano in a limited edition, Hermit in Paris--Pref.

In a small square on the left bank of the Seine, the door to a green-fronted bookshop beckoned... With gangsters on his tail and his meager savings in hand, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer fled Canada in 1999 and ended up in Paris. Broke and almost homeless, he found himself invited to a tea party amongst the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for...

When Louisa Deasey receives a message from a Frenchwoman called Coralie, who has found a cache of letters in an attic, written about Louisa's father, neither woman can imagine the events it will set in motion. The letters, dated 1949, detail a passionate affair between Louisa's father, Denison, and Coralie's grandmother, Michelle, in post-war London. They spark Louisa to find out more about her father, who died when she was six. From the seemingly...

Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Cowley and others "escaped" to Europe, as exiles. The adventures and attitudes shared by these American writers, dubbed "the lost generation", are brought to life in this book of prose works.