The best books about Paris

By Tim Martin

Paris is overwritten. Step into Shakespeare and Co. on the Left Bank (or, even better, among the teetering stacks of the Abbey Bookshop a few streets over) and you’ll find yourself gazing into an abyss of Books About Paris to which every hack in a century with a typewriter and a ticket has contributed. The problem is less where to start than where to stop.

Quickly, then, the classics. To dip a toe in Balzac, start with the short but excellent Colonel Chabert. Zola’s heartrendingly grim L’Assommoir either kills you or makes you stronger. Dumas’s The Count of Monte-Cristo has fabulous Paris sequences. The choice between Hugo’s misérables and his hunchback is up to you. For Americans in wartime Paris, read Ernest Hemingway – you probably will anyway – or Charles Glass’s prosaically titled but excellent history Americans in Paris. A lesser-known gem for fans of boho lit is Prince Charming, a memoir by Christopher Logue, a poet who spent several reprobate (but well-connected) years in a 1950s Paris slum.