Summer reading, Paris style

Marsha Nathanson
Jul 26, 2017 · 1 min read

Hemingway wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Paris Was Ours is a collection of stories and reflections from thirty-two writers. Stacy Schiff, author of “In Franklin’s Footsteps,” has a way of making history jump off the page and into your imagination. Schiff moved to Paris to do research for a book on Ben Franklin, and ended up living in the polymath’s old neighborhood, a bakery stroll from the home of John Adams. Jeremy Mercer, who wrote “My Bookstore High,” lived at the legendary Shakespeare & Co. Most writers live at the bookstore, figuratively speaking. Mercer actually slept there.

Paris, Elie Wiesel wrote, is a “city of encounters, of furtive and painful discoveries.”


Notes

Paris Was Ours, edited by Penelope Rowlands. Copyright 2011 by Penelope Rowlands. Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Stacy Schiff wrote A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.

Jeremy Mercer wrote Time Was Soft There.

Hemingway quote from A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, 2009.

Elie Wiesel quote from The Testament, 1981.

Marsha Nathanson

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