Paris Soirees

An elegant and ironic journey through the City of Love, as told through a wordless collection of short stories.

Sequel to the bestselling Our House is Not in Paris. Join for the first time, or continue to share in this sequel, the French renovee trials and triumphs of Susan and Stuart Cutsforth, an 'ordinary' Australian couple. Our House is Certainly Not in Paris is a magical memoir about their renovation of an old farmhouse in France. They devote their holidays to breathing life back into its ancient stone walls. It is so charmingly written that the reader is transported to their petite village and the people in this book become like old friends. This is a story about achieving dreams. It makes you want to grab life with both hands.

What was it like to visit Paris a century ago in 1924 when it was the most exciting city in the world? Where were the best places to eat? Where was the nightlife? Who might you expect to meet? And what were the fabled 'Chariots of Fire' Olympics really like? What has changed ... and indeed what is still there? Americans flocked to a city where there was no Prohibition and little inhibition. The arts flourished. Convention was challenged the new celebrated and non-conformity accepted. What did Chanel, Picasso and Hemingway and the rest get up to? All of this and more is swept up and revealed in Paris 1924 an amusing insightful and sometimes salacious guide to one of the world's greatest — and most beloved — cities.

The Mini Rough Guide to Paris is your perfect companion to Europe's most visited and romantic capital. The full-colour section introduces Paris' highlights, with incisive accounts of all the top sights from the Eiffel Tower to the Marais quarter. You'll find updated accounts of all the key attractions, expert reviews of the best hotels and restaurants, as well as expanded coverage of all the top bars, shops, clubs and markets. The guide also covers excursions away from the city, including day-trips to Disneyland Paris and Versailles. This updated 4th edition comes complete with clear, readable maps that have grid references for all the top attractions and recommendations - all you need to know and nothing more. Entertaining, engaging, and opinionated, this guide is unbeatable.

Rousseau's Legacy focuses on the new and influential paradigm of the writer that emerged in the decades immediately preceding the French Revolution. Ushered in by Rousseau's combining revolutionary sociopolitical critique with a new art of autobiography, the writer would henceforth differ greatly from the traditional "man of letters." Rousseau inaugurated the idea of a heroic and committed writerly life in which the opposition between public and private selves is collapsed. This was done in the cause of creating a future political community founded on transparency. Porter, with both a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory and an informed interest in cultural/historical context, gives close readings of relevant works by a number of major French writers, including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Sartre, Barthes, Duras, Althusser, and Foucault. Thus, he explores the persistent importance of the Rousseauist paradigm for French literary culture. The book goes beyond a critique or theory that interprets literary or philosophical works for their own sake, to reveal representations and self-representations of the idea of the writer in paintings, engravings, and photographs, as well as in literary texts. In concluding, Porter argues that with the collapse of faith in social and individual regeneration through revolution, the archetype of such a writer is also waning.

Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the practice of the "Tombeaux" and as seen in the Album zutique; the interplay of text and image through illustrations for literary works; the collective ventures of literary journals; and multi-author prose works by authors such as the Goncourt brothers and Erckmann-Chatrian. Interdisciplinary in scope, these essays form a cohesive investigation of collaboration that extends beyond literature to include journalism and the relationships and tensions between literature and the arts. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author