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EXPATRIATE LITERARY           CIRCLE  

Paris Reading Project      Contributed by Charles T. Downey

"What started as a theme in my reading has become an obsession. This is a list of books, mostly fiction, set in the city of Paris, through which I am slowly making my way. If you have any ideas of books not on this list that need to be on it, especially examples of world literature with which I am probably not familiar, e-mail them to me (praecentor@yahoo.com) for inclusion."

Available from Amazon:

André Breton, Nadja (1960)

Daniel Pennac, The Fairy Gunmother (La fée carabine, 1987)

Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (1926)

Edith Wharton, Custom of the Country (1913)

Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway, (1964)

Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald, (1934)

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932)

Gertrude Stein, Paris France (1940)
In French:
Œuvres de François Villon (1431–1463), edited by Clément Marot

Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris, 1405-1449

Alexandre Dumas père, The Man in the Iron Mask (1846)

Alexandre Dumas père, The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas père, The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias [Camille]

Henri Mürger, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1847-49)

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861 ed. in French)

Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose (Spleen de Paris)

Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques: L'art romantique

Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black)

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)

Abbé Prévost (Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles), Manon Lescaut

Honoré de Balzac, An Episode under the Terror

Honoré de Balzac, Bureaucracy

Honoré de Balzac, Catherine de Medici

Honoré de Balzac, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Guy de Maupassant, La parure et autres contes parisiens

Gérard de Nerval, Nuits d'octobre

Gérard de Nerval, Promenades et souvenirs

Gérard de Nerval, Les filles du feu

Eugène Süe, Les Mystères de Paris

Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)

Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Guillaume Apollinaire, Le flâneur des deux rives

Françoise Sagan, Chagrin de Passage

Marguerite Duras, La pluie d'été

Daniel Pennac, The Scapegoat, Monsieur Malaussène, Passion Fruit, The Fairy Gunmother, Write to Kill, Comme un roman, translated by Ian Monk (see post from August 17, 2003)

In English:
Memorandums of a Residence in France in the Winter of 1815-16

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837)

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

James Fenimore Cooper, A Residence in France (1836)

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869)

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

Henry James, The American (1877)

Henry James, A Little Tour in France (1884)

Henry James, Madame de Mauves (1874) (or Project Gutenberg text)

Edith Wharton, Fighting France

Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (1923)

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (c. 1765-1768)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Victor Hugo's Romances

Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books: François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker

Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth (1929)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Roget

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kiliminjaro (1938)

Gore Vidal, The Judgment of Paris (1952)

Mary McCarthy, Birds of America (1971)

Irwin Shaw, Paris! Paris!

Janet Flanner, Paris Journal (1972)

Henry Miller, Under the Roofs of Paris (Opus Pistorum), essentially pornography for which Miller was paid $1/page and written when he was in need of money back in California

Brassaï, Conversations With Picasso

Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the '30s

Brassaï, Paris By Night

Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank 1929-1933

Ned Rorem, The Paris Diary

Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony

Edmund White, The Married Man

Mavis Gallant, Paris Diary (1992, published in The New Yorker, December 24/31, 2001)

Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

Paris in Mind, edited by Jennifer Lee, an anthology of 29 excerpts of novels, memoirs, and so on relating to American experiences in Paris


Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy (1940/56)
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–32)
Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (1966)

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956)
A. J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)
Edmund White, The Flaneur (2001)
Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (2000)