Fans pick 100 books like The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris

This book focuses on the role of modern architecture in Paris, and by “modern,” Dennis has in mind the architecture created during the reinvention of Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dennis provides the best introduction to a crucial factor in Paris’s essence: the particular kind of residential architecture that became characteristic of the cityscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the hôtel or townhouse. Great architecture helps make a city great, and in Paris in particular, much of the greatest modern architecture was originally residential – grand townhouses built for the wealthiest Parisians.

Today, most of these townhouses have become museums, government ministries, foreign embassies. With its focus on the relation between public and private space in the city and the ways in which residential architecture can and should function in relation to the streets and the public space in which it is embedded, Dennis’s work is essential… show more.

This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.

I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work. 

I recommend Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place for Rykwert’s wonderful reflections on the relation between people and their cities, and on the essential questions of why cities succeed – or why they fail to work successfully for their inhabitants.

After the literature of Paris, the painting of Paris. T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life studies the ways in which the artists he calls “painters of modern life” created canvases that attempted to focus attention on a subsequent transformation of Paris, in the nineteenth century. Clark considers the depictions by painters such as Manet, Degas, and Seurat of Paris as it evolved and of Parisians interacting with their changing city. The depictions of Parisians experiencing the boulevards, cafés, and parks of Paris that Clark analyzes are perhaps the greatest tradition ever of city painting. No one has ever attempted such a study of the many paintings of Paris as it was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When they do so, Clark’s book can provide a model.

It can be difficult to recall that, while laying waste to the armies of Europe, proving himself to be one of the finest military commanders in history, Napoleon was writing salty love letters home to his wife. Narrated in first-person diary-style by Josephine, Sandra Gulland’s sensational trio of books is a credit to the sometimes-overlooked genre of historical autobiographical fiction. The events around her life with the self-anointed Emperor of the French are defined with both intimacy and sweep. Josephine emerges as a most intriguing woman, charming and clever, and a full participant aside from her husband as he rises and falls.

The three books cover the many phases of her exceptional life. From her childhood in the French colony of Martinique, through her first marriage and imprisonment during the revolution, to her fateful introduction to the “strange little man,” and through their marriage and demise, the woman who became… show more.

A funny and moving account of life in occupied Paris by two young sisters, one sensible and studious, the other fun-loving. Written in diary form by each sister in turn, hence the ‘four hands’. Some signs of touching up with hindsight before publication in 1962. There is an English translation, ‘Diary in duo’ (1965) but currently out of print.

This is an intimate, first-person account of 1920’s Paris, and the life of one of the most central characters of the period—the model, singer, and artist, Kiki of Montparnasse as she was known by all. Born in Burgundy in 1901, christened Alice Prin, and raised by her grandmother in abject poverty, at age twelve she was shipped off to Paris to live with the mother she had never known.

The young Alice’s fierce survival instincts immediately translated into a precocious thirst for experience. At fourteen she had her “first contact with art” when she began posing nude for a sculptor. Thereafter, she assumed the name and embraced life as the irrepressible Kiki. Lover of Man Ray, beloved friend of Soutine, Jean Cocteau, and many other artists of the period, she became the toast of Montparnasse, one of the century’s first truly independent women. Man Ray, Foujita, Kisling, and others immortalized… show more.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

The description above segues nicely into The New Paris by Lindsey Traumata, published in 2017. Traumata now has a second book published, and hosts a podcast, and is popular on social media. I have spent at least a month (and sometimes three) in Paris annually over the past six years and think of Traumata’s first book as a good friend. She writes wonderful profiles of people, and she keeps readers updated about bistros, winemakers, new cuisine. Her writing is elegant, and I read her descriptions as avidly as I do a novel, constantly making notes. So different from the usual guidebooks.

I loved this story about a protagonist who is living her worst nightmare, and we’re along for the unpredictable twists and turns of her life.

The story is everything you’d expect for a well-conceived psychological drama where true-to-life characters come alive and live the nightmare you’re glad isn’t your own. It held my attention and wouldn’t let go!