100 books like The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

It is virtually impossible to write or even investigate medieval southern France, especially the famous Cathar Period without delving into this classic work.

Still available in different translations, Le Roy Ladurie takes us into the life of a 14th-century French mountain village and its people in a way no one else has ever attempted. Based upon meticulous church records of contemporary individual interviews and interrogations with alleged heretics in one small village by Church Inquisitors, the author gives us a look into the lives of common people of that time that has never been equaled.

I found myself returning to this small book time and again in creating my own setting and characters (including borrowing authentic names at times) for a near-contemporary portion of the story I wanted to build within the larger framework of time and place I was focused upon.

The reader gets a true sense of the… show more.

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.

Looking back across six decades, MFK Fisher, one of the most astute and evocative travel and gastronomical authors ever to put pen to paper, recalls the year when everything for her was new: France, Europe, marriage, food, culture. Based in provincial Dijon, Mary studied French, shopped in the open markets, learned to cook, and jotted down astute observations concerning everyone she met, while her husband wrote his dissertation. My first encounter with Tours, in 1979, reminds me of Fisher’s encounter with Dijon in 1929. Like her, I was warmed by the joy of discovery, the sense that every stone and leaf, every living thing that I encountered had layers upon layers of meaning, and it was my job to uncover some of them, revealing meanings that no one had seen before. 

We can’t understand the present unless we understand the past, but the reverse is also true: I would not be a good historian of medieval poverty – including all the layers of infrastructure, production, famine, religious ideology, and public policy that define, ameliorate and exacerbate poverty – if I did not also pay attention to how these forces work in the present, and to the actual lives of the people who are so affected. This book paints some of the best portraits I’ve seen of people who were trying to make ends meet during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We now need a book on how and why the poverty landscape continues to change in the wake of the covid epidemic. 

In grad school, Adam and I had the same advisor, McArthur ‘Genius’ Kirk Varnedoe, and as a lifelong New Yorker reader, I’ve avidly followed his career. Paris to the Moon is an engaging memoir of his family and professional life as an ex-pat New Yorker writer in Paris during the 1990s. I love his insider-outsider perspective and the fact that he lived in my favorite neighborhood, rive Gauche at the boundary between the 6th and 7th arrondissements. With a sociologist-anthropologist’s eye, Adam interrogates the quintessentially Parisian (why Café Flore has surpassed Deux Magots in fashionability, for instance), attends lectures by celebrity sociologist Jean Beaudrillard, muses about the public reception of labor strikes, negotiates toddler culture in Paris, and take us food exploring with the iconic Alice Waters.

A Moveable Feast is life-changing, with its introspective and evocative exploration of Hemingway’s early years as a struggling writer in the 1920s. It heavily inspired me to make my own move and pursue my authorship journey in Paris!

Through vivid and poetic prose, Hemingway captures the bohemian atmosphere of the era. The book delves into themes of creativity, love, loss, and pursuing one's artistic vision. Hemingway's raw and honest reflections on his own experiences and struggles offer profound insights into the nature of art, resilience, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. 

This book inspired me to uncover my passions, live the life of my dreams, embrace the beauty of the world around me, and, most importantly, savor every moment.

While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.

I love Stein’s unapologetic and brazen queerness at a time when that was not exactly appreciated. Toklas was Stein’s lifelong lover, with whom she shared her life in Paris.

To me, this book feels like a love letter. My favorite scene is the one in which Toklas and Stein invite the struggling artists of Paris to dinner and then sit them opposite paintings they themselves have made in order to keep them from arguing. Stein’s wit is as lively as ever in this book, and–it’s simply the best example of a hoax autobiography I can think of. And it certainly puts paid to any notion that an autobiographical text might be stable or even a little truthy.

Words do marvelous things as they emerge out of Stein’s brilliant mind. 

In Henry James’ masterpiece from 1901, Lambert Strether, aged 55, is a Boston Puritan who hasn’t lived. He travels to Paris on an ambassadorial mission.

From the moment of arrival in Paris he is beguiled and intrigued, but unclear what to do. He proceeds to meander through gilded French drawing rooms in which high aesthetic taste of both manner and décor presides. This quiet and modest outsider eventually fills out into the man who runs the show.

Strether has discovered what to know, who to choose, and when to move. Everything depends on it. The method must be learnt in the thick of lived life along the way.

Here is evidence of the existence of a god within, a wisdom of soul with a coherent vision of what matters, one that slyly directs the focus of the person walking confusedly in the world, leading them to move with discrimination.

David Sedaris conveys humor and family behavior in one sentence. Most can relate to his spot-on observations about people. David Sedaris is able to define people in a unique way, one that most of us don't see until he shows us so many quirks of humanity! His writing truly makes me laugh out loud.