Product details
- ISBN 9781844080267
- Weight: 226g
- Dimensions: 113 x 132mm
- Publication Date: 04 Dec 2003
- Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'Gave New Yorker readers a witty guide to the minutiae of life abroad' JAMES CAMPBELL, GUARDIAN
'Cafe Society described from the best table in the place, by a writer with rare and vivid gifts' ROBERT LACEY
'Lively and witty . . . fascinating escapist entertainment' LEEDS GUIDE
In 1925, Janet Flanner began writing a fortnightly 'Letter from Paris' for the nascent New Yorker. Her brief: to tell New Yorkers, under her pen name of 'Genet', what the French thought was going on in France, not what she thought.
Paris Was Yesterday is a collection of those letters written in the 1920s and 1930s, surely one of the most fascinating periods in the city's history and it reads like an Arts Who's Who. Flanner saw it all and knew everyone (or at least all about them), and there are tidbits galore about the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso and Marlena Dietrich.
Witty, catty, literary and unashamedly gossipy, it's a lively portrait of the thriving cultural life in Paris between the wars. In the brilliantly entertaining style she made her own, Flanner mixed high and low culture to devastating effect.
Janet Flanner (1892-1978) was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of the New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.
She travelled to Europe in 1921, where she spent the rest of her life, mainly in Paris. Her Paris Journal 1944-1965 won the National Book Award. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Flanner also received the Legion of Honor. She wrote under the pen name "Genêt" and published various novels which include Men and Monuments (1957), Paris Was Yesterday (1972) and The Cubical City (1974).
