Adam Gopnik

With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive. So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis." As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation - I did anyway - even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."

From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a tradition-bound bastion of the old world of Europe; a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art; and a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love thought impossible at home. Including stories, letters, memoirs, and journalism, "Americans in Paris" distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called ?the most brilliant city in the world.? American writers came to Paris as statesmen, soldiers, students, tourists, and sometimes they stayed as expatriates. This anthology ranges from the crucial early impressions of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the latter-day reflections of writers as varied as James Baldwin, Isadora Duncan, and Jack Kerouac. Along the way we encounter the energetic travelers of the nineteenth century?Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James?and the pilgrims of the twentieth: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Cole Porter, Henry Miller. Come along as Thomas Paine takes a direct and dangerous part in the French Revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe tours the Louvre; Theodore Dreiser samples the sensual enticements of Parisian night life; Edith Wharton movingly describes Paris in the early days of World War I; John Dos Passos charts the gathering political storms of the 1930s; Paul Zweig recalls the intertwined pleasures of language and sex; and A. J. Liebling savors the memory of his culinary education in delicious detail. "Americans in Paris" is a diverse and constantly engaging mosaic, full of revealing cultural gulfs and misunderstandings, personal and literary experimentation, and profound moments of self-discovery. Contents: Letter to Mary Stevenson by Benjamin Franklin Letters from Auteuil by Abigail Adams Two letters by Thomas Jefferson from A diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris Shall Louis XVI. have respite? by Thomas Paine from The diary of James Gallatin by James Gallatin from Life, letters, and journals by George Ticknor Letter to Stephen Longfellow, Jr. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Journal, 1833 by Ralph Waldo Emerson from Pencillings by the way by Nathaniel Parker Willis from Gleanings in Europe by James Fenimore Cooper from Struggles and triumphs; or, Forty years' recollections by P.T. Barnum from Catlin's Notes of eight years' travels and residence in Europe by George Catlin from Things and thoughts in Europe by Margaret Fuller from Sunny memories of foreign lands by Harriet Beecher Stowe from The French notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne from The innocents abroad by Mark Twain The proclamation of the republic by Elihu Washburne Occasional Paris ; "The velvet glove" by Henry James Letter from Paris by Frederick Douglass Letter to John Hay by Henry Adams from The show-places of Paris by Richard Harding Davis. from My life by Isadora Duncan from A life in photography by Edward Steichen from Along this way by James Weldon Johnson A traveler at forty by Theodore Dreiser The look of Paris ; from A backward glance by Edith Wharton Mon amie by Randolph Bourne Paris notebook, 1921 by Sherwood Anderson from Peter Whiffle by Carl Van Vechten Significant gesture by Malcolm Cowley from Life among the surrealists by Matthew Josephson from The big sea by Langston Hughes from Gentlemen prefer blondes by Anita Loos Four letters from Paris, 1925 by William Faulkner from Post impressions ; Vive la Folie! by E.E. Cummings from The spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh The flying fool by Waverly Root from A moveable feast by Ernest Hemingway Postcard to Samuel Loveman by Hart Crane Paris diaries by Harry Crosby You don't know Paree by Cole Porter Babylon revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald From an early diary by Lincoln Kirstein from The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ; from Paris France by Gertrude Stein Walking up and down in China by Henry Miller A spring month in Paris by John Dos Passos from The flower and the nettle by Anne Morrow Lindberg. The last time I saw Paris by Oscar Hammerstein II from Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach Letter from Paris by Janet Flanner Paris, 7 A.M. by Elizabeth Bishop No. 13 Rue St. Augustin by Ludwig Bemelmans Place Pigalle by Richard Wilbur Three letters by Dawn Powell from First days in Paris by Art Buchwald Equal in Paris by James Baldwin from Remembrance of things past by Irwin Shaw The saucier's apprentice by S.J. Perlman Good-bye to a world by May Sarton from Departures by Paul Zweig The first time I saw Paris by James Thurber Trouble in Paris by Sidney Bechet from Between meals : an appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling 17 Quai Voltaire by Virgil Thomson from Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac Gare de Lyon by M.F.K. Fisher from D.V. by Diana Vreeland from Birthday by Dorothea Tanning

A vivid memoir that captures the energy, ambition and romance of New York in the 1980s from the beloved New Yorker Canadian writer, to stand alongside his bestselling Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha Parker, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young and the arty and ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Stranger's Gate builds a portrait of this moment in New York through the story of their journey--from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to their tiny basement room on the Upper East Side--the smallest apartment in Manhattan--and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. Between tender, laugh-out-loud reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of New York luminaries from Richard Avedon to Robert Hughes and Jeff Koons, Gopnik takes us into the corridors of Conde Nast, the galleries of MoMA and many places between to illuminate the fascinating world capital of creativity and aspiration that is New York, then and now.