100 books like Coq

Harriet Welty Rochefort was born and raised in small-town Iowa but she made her way to Paris right after graduating from college. Married to a Frenchman for more than 50 years, she is deeply integrated into French family life. This book offers, therefore, the dual perspective of an outsider who is now also an insider. Her interviews with experts ranging from patissiers and sommeliers to coiffeurs and sellers of lingerie and perfume provide a rich in-depth exploration of the details of daily French life. I love the sidebar conversations she has with her husband, who provides his invaluable perspective on how the French think; the many handy bits of practical advice she has gathered from her mother-in-law over the years; and her unabashed and enduring appreciation of her American roots. 

If you are a fan of Medieval history and Paris, Hugo’s novel is for you. Hollywood, of course, turned it into The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Before I wrote the text for my book published after the fire, in 2019, I read this story and discovered Hugo was a great fan of Medieval architecture, incorporating chapters on the construction of Notre Dame throughout his book. This was invaluable research for me, but it also saved Notre Dame in the 1830s which had been in terrible condition after the Revolution and was almost sold.

Thanks to his novel, which the public loved but the critics dismissed, an arts competition was established to repair Notre Dame to its former glory.

People often ask me what is the best book to take with them to Paris if they can only take one, and this is the book I always recommend. This collection of essays, which can easily fit into a purse or a backpack, is brimming over with fascinating stories about “the people, places, and phenomena” of Paris. Downie’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, and the idiosyncratic curiosity that draws him (and his readers along with him) into a variety of offbeat situations make for fun as well as highly informative reading. It’s a great book to take with you to read in Paris, or sitting at home dreaming of or remembering Paris—and the selection of topics is varied enough that I believe there’s something in it to interest almost anyone. 

I bought this book during a weekend trip to Paris, and it turned out to be my favorite souvenir.

The author and illustrator are a husband and wife team, and they’ve cooked up a lovely character in Kylie, who is based on a real-life crocodile found once upon a time in the canals of Paris!

I bought an English version of this French novel about Paris while actually in that city as a starving backpacker, and have forever associated the wacky joyfulness of the book with the pleasures of that trip. Originally written in a high-energy, idiomatic, slangy, bawdy version of French that scandalized many conservative readers, the plot involves a young country girl named Zazie, obsessed with the Parisian subway system called the Metro, though she’s never seen it. Finally allowed to visit her uncle in the city, she is outraged to find the Metro closed, its workers on strike. She runs away, roaming the crowded city streets, her hilarious extended tantrum not only upsetting her befuddled uncle’s safe and settled lifestyle, but also spreading a generalized craziness throughout Paris. 

This biography of the famous French authoress Collette explores the sensuously Parisian life of the famed and inflammatory author. It explores many of her sensuous love affairs along with her fabulous accomplishments. This biography marches through time in Paris, from the Belle Epoch to the lean years of the World Wars, to the shining beacon Paris became in the later half of the twentieth century. Through the life of the indomitable authoress Collette, the city of Paris truly sparkles as we see that her history is so entwined with the city’s history.

If we want to understand medieval or modern Paris, we need to gain some familiarity with all of the stages along the way. Robb provides some episodic portraits of some of those stages, and the chapter on the eighteenth-century architect Charles-Axel Guillaumot is one of the most arresting discussions I’ve ever seen of how the actions of those living in one epoch can reverberate for generations to come. Guillaumot literally saved Paris from collapsing in on its medieval past by bracing up the swiss-cheese-like network of tunnels that had been left behind by its medieval quarry workers.

This biography gives you the inside experience of one of the most visible lesbians in Paris during the mid-twentieth century.

Genet was the pseudonym for Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s correspondent for France. Flanner knew and wrote about everyone. Her column noting Anderson’s death is particularly touching. From Indiana to the City of Lights in one lifetime.

As the much-missed Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a train that waits for nobody.” And that train comes whooshing through Paris quite a lot.

This book captures some of the inimitable energy and agitation of Paris Fashion Week, as self-taught photographer Meyabe covers six seasons—men’s, women’s, and couture—over a single year. It includes an introduction by local fashion hero Loïc Prigent and is published by my friends Alex and Marie from Ofr. (who also published Makers Paris #2).

Ofr. is an indie arts bookshop, gallery and publisher, always in the moment, that channels a certain bohemian spirit proper to Paris: “Open, Free and Ready”.

We are coded as homo sapiens to look at each other. To observe, study, analyse our fellow creatures. One of the reasons I’ll never live in the country is that I’ll miss observing urban life. 

This is such a simple book with a simple premise. Perec recorded everything he saw while sitting at a café on a Parisian square over three days. When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I had a dog-eared French version of this book and I dutifully went to the same place. Not to record my own observations but to try and see things that Perec might have seen twenty years prior.

A city-dweller regards their city. This book is at once nothing and yet it is everything about urban life. I found in Perec a comrade in arms. The romantic in me insists on believing that the seeds for my later urban observations lie… show more.