Synopses & Reviews
In her third literary Baedeker, Alice Leccese Powers-editor of
Italy in Mind and
Ireland in Mind-explores France through the senses and sensibilities of thirty-three British and American authors.
The food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France are described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists. From Gertrude Steins Paris to Ezra Pounds Pyrenees; from Tobias Smollett, who grumbled, to Peter Mayle, who settled in; and from Edith Wharton on falling in love to David Sedaris on falling over French grammar-here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language.
Henry Adams • James Baldwin • Elizabeth Bishop • Mary Blume • James Fenimore Cooper • Charles Dickens • Lawrence Durrell • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • M. F. K. Fisher • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Janet Flanner • Adam Gopnik • Joanne Harris • Ernest Hemingway • Washington Irving • Henry James • Thomas Jefferson • Stanley Karnow • Peter Mayle • Mary McCarthy • Jan Morris • Ezra Pound • David Sedaris • Tobias Smollett • Gertrude Stein • Robert Louis Stevenson • Paul Theroux • Gillian Tindall • Calvin Trillin • Mark Twain • Edith Wharton • Richard Wilbur • William Carlos Williams
Synopsis
From Gertrude Stein's Paris to Ezra Pound's Pyrenees; from Tobias Smollett, who grumbled, to Peter Mayle, who settled in; and from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad to David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day -- here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language. Here are the food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists.
Synopsis
Here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language. Here are the food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists.
About the Author
Alice Leccese Powers is the editor of the anthologies Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind, and co-editor of The Brooklyn Reader: Thirty Writers Celebrate Americas Favorite Borough. A freelance writer and editor, she has been published in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and many other newspapers and magazines. Ms. Powers also teaches writing at the Corcoran School of Art and Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three daughters.