Please join me and other contributors to the anthology Wandering in Paris, as we read selections of this new release from Wanderland Writers.
We’ll be at Alliance Francaise in San Francisco on Thursday, December 12, from 6 to 8 p.m. I haven’t decided which story I’ll read from, but it will be one of these:
- French Kiss: In which I research Parisian intimacies in an attempt to discover what makes French women so … French. And what makes a French kiss French. Also involved: Parisian household appliances and expensive lingerie.
- Bien-Être at the Hammam: In which I find myself nearly naked and smeared with a mysterious goop in a roomful of strangers who do not speak English. In the midst of thick, swirling steam. Without my glasses.
- Death in Paris: In which I am haunted—and then healed—by the Specter of Death while visiting the city that loves to celebrate the macabre, from reliquaries and taxidermy to cemeteries and catacombs.
The book has received accolades from authors who know Paris well:
- Phil Cousineau, author of The Art of Pilgrimage and The Book of Roads, writes, “Wandering in Paris is not only one of my favorite things to do, it is also the title of this marvelous new collection of stories and poems. As you read through them, don’t be surprised if you hear the voice of Edith Piaf herself as she sings, ‘C’est merveilleaux.’ ‘It’s marvelous.’ So is this transportive book.”
- Georgia Hesse, recipient of the prestigious French Chevalier de l’Order National du Mérite and founding travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner, writes, “No European civilization since Renaissance Florence has so spurred the artistic imagination as did Paris of the 1920s and ’30s. Its pentimento lingers, as contemporary writers discover in our present the sensuous and seductive shadows of a storied past. Open the pages of Wandering in Paris upon a patina of the incandescent city.”
- And the illustrious David D. Downie, author of Paris to the Pyrennes, wrote … well, David wrote the foreword to Wandering in Paris. Pick up the book and have a look.
