Paris Stories

by Shaun Whiteside (Editor)

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, French Literature, France

416 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2015

Reviews

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked quite a lot of this collection. My favourite was the excerpt from Les Miserables about the Parisian sewers. Who knew! A couple of the other pieces I found overlong and/or incomprehensible but then I don't grasp a lot these days.

[Yas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book me on the next flight to Paris!

[Karīna Janova-Jannava · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ļoti jauka grāmatiņa, kuru iegādājos slavenajā Parīzes grāmatnīcā Shakspeare and Company. Sentimentāli varēju pagarināt burvīgās 4 dienu brīvdienas Parīzē.

Grāmatā apkopoti fragmenti no dažādu franču un ne-franču autoru darbiem, kuros pieminēta/aprakstīta Parīze. Sākot ar Rablē jokiem par Parīzes nosaukuma rašanos (1534.g.) līdz mūsdienu autoriem. Visvairāk patika fragments no Igo Nožēlojamiem. Pārsteidza Georges Perec “Things”. Gribētos to izlasīt pilnā apmērā.

[Josh Scherzer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly excerpts from larger works, this compilation offers disappointingly little in the way of short stories set in or redolent of Paris.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Everyman's Library anthology mostly consists of excerpts from full-length books. Looking through the table of contents there are only 6 selections that are not excerpts, mostly novels. This didn't bother me, but I can understand why it might deter some from picking it up. The selections span 4 centuries (from the ribald humor of Rabelais to the gossipy account of the Beats meeting the French Surrealists to the lyrical desperation of Jean Rhys) this is a nice sampler of different writers & how they thought of & portrayed Paris. In no way meant to be an exhaustive survey of French literature, such an endeavour would take multiple volumes as shown by the recent Penguin pub of 2 volume set of French short stories. To say nothing of poetry, essays, drama.
3.5 STARS

[cat ⋆*｡☆˚ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Random short stories, some entertaining and others just not compelling enough.
I liked that each story had the different author/translator's writing style.
Reading about Parisian sewers in 'Les Misérables' was peak, but my favorite was 'The Polymith'.

[Shirley Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-curated selection of short stories and excerpts from Novels, all with Paris as their setting. Some I really liked, some I really disliked. My likes invite more exploration of their authors:

*A Harlot High and Low (1838-57) by Honoré de Balzac
**Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo
**A Sentimental Education (1869) by Gustave Flaubert
**L'Assommoir (1880) by Émile Zola
**A Parisian Affair (1881) by Guy de Maupassant
*Giovanni's Room (1956) by James Baldwin
*Paris Xe (1980) by Richard Cobb
*The Golden Droplet (1986) by Michel Tournier

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

[Darby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved A Parisian Affair by Maupassant