What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorTropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 321 pages
A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Süskind · 263 pages
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Brian Selznick · 534 pages
ORPHAN, CLOCK KEEPER, AND THIEF, twelve-year-old Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric girl and the owner of a small toy booth in the train station, Hugo’s undercover life, and his most precious secret, are put in jeopardy. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen
Our Lady of the Flowers
Jean Genet · 318 pages
"Novel by Jean Genet, written while he was in prison for burglary and published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame des fleurs. The novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who cons
One Evening in Paris
Nicolas Barreau · 280 pages
"Alain Bonnard, the owner of a small art cinema in Paris, is a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic. In his Cinema Paradis there are no buckets of popcorn, no XXL coca-colas, no Hollywood blockbusters. Not a good business plan if you want to survive, but Alain holds firm to his principles of quality. He wants to show films that create dreams, and he likes most of the people that come to his cinema. Particul
Paris Red
Maureen Gibbon · 288 pages
"At seventeen, Victorine Meurent abandons her old life to become immersed in the Parisian society of dance halls and cafés, meeting writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. As Manet's model, Victorine explores a world of new possibilities and stirs the artist to push the boundaries of painting in his infamous portrait Olympia, which scandalizes even the most cosmopolitan city"--Dust
Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
Sjon · 151 pages
Reykjavik, 1918. The eruptions of the Katla volcano darken the sky night and day. Yet despite the natural disaster, the shortage of coal and the Great War still raging in the outside world, life in the small capital goes on as always. Sixteen-year-old Mani Steinn lives for the movies. Awake, he lives on the fringes of society. Asleep, he dreams in pictures, the threads of his own life weaving thro
Syndrome E
Franck Thilliez · 372 pages
"Lucie Henebelle, single mother and beleaguered detective, has just about enough on her plate with one daughter in the hospital and another off at summer camp when she receives a panicked call from an ex-lover. Lucie's old friend has developed a case of hysterical blindness after watching an obscure and mysterious film from the 1950s. Embedded in the film are subliminal images so unspeakably heino
Missing Person
Patrick Modiano · 168 pages
"For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a y
The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Anais Nin · 187 pages
Petite Mort
Beatrice Hitchman · 329 pages
Scandal, intoxication, and lies flourish in the silent film studios of Paris. A silent film destroyed in a fire in 1913 before it was seen even by its director. A lowly seamstress who makes the costumes she should be wearing but believes her talent, and the secret she keeps too, will get her a dressing room of her own. Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death ... A sil
Submission
Michel Houellebecq · 251 pages
In a near-future France, François, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead, and his lifelong obsession--the ideas and works of the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans--has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalist society where consumerism has become the new religion, François is spiritually barren, but seeking to fill the vacu
Paris Trance
Geoff Dyer · 276 pages
"Luke moves to Paris with the idea of writing a novel, but life gets in the way. He befriends a fellow expatriate, Alex, and then falls in love with Nicole. Alex meets Sahra, and the two couples form an intimacy that changes their lives. As they discover the clubs and cafes of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunne
The World at Night
Alan Furst · 312 pages
Reminiscent of the films noir of the 1940s, Alan Furst's World War II spy novels are classics of the form, widely praised as the most authentic and best-written espionage fiction today. In The World at Night Furst brings his extraordinary touch to a story of honor and lost love set against one of the twentieth century's great battlegrounds of intrigues - the German-occupied Paris of 1940. On the
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos · 400 pages
Cet ouvrage, ou plutot ce recueil, que le public trouvera peut-etre encore trop volumineux, ne contient pourtant que le plus petit nombre des lettres qui composaient la totalite de la correspondance dont il est extrait. Charge de la mettre en ordre par les personnes a qui elle etait parvenue, et que je savais dans l'intention de la publier, je n'ai demande, pour prix de mes soins, que la permissio
Half Life
Shelley Jackson · 440 pages
A brilliant, disquieting first novel about a pair of conjoined twins who are deeply unhappy in each other's company. Nora, the dominant twin, is strong, funny, and deeply independent, thirsting for love and adventure. Blanche, by contrast, has been sleeping for nearly twenty years. Finally sick of carrying her sister's dead weight, Nora decides she wants her other half gone for good, so she leaves
The Deer Park
Norman Mailer · 348 pages
Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want—an
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 224 pages
Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.