Paris

This book, like all others from this now deceased author were translated from French in the 1980's from memoirs that recently became public. Anne Marie's books have been translated into many many languages and are timeless in their appeal and eroticism. Based mainly on the authors', or her friends real life, and somewhat embellished experiences, I understand that she wrote these books for her own personal erotic gratification. What a marvellous stroke of luck that many of the memoirs have come to light for us to enjoy.

Most, if not all of the authors books deal with games of life and love that the decadent wealthly played incessantly in Paris during the 1920's. The theme of many of the stories seem to invariably involve beutifull and wealthy society women, which, I must say, pretty well have the morals of alley cats, and are usually on the hunt for men and erotic diversions. For the hunt to be enjoyable, the hunted should usually not be aware of the game and feel that he is the master of his own destiny, what a laugh .... most of the men really don't know what had hit them though they would be lax in admitting to themselves that they were used and abused at will .....

In Scandale D'Amour, we find two very similar books titled 'Mystere D'Amour' which is 320 pages and 'Folies D'Amour' which is 248 pages in length.

Both books are a compendium of short stories each with its own plot, characters and delicious stories of erotic seduction and submission. The author has an innate knack for allowing the reader to quickly identify with one or another of the characters in each story making one feel as though you are a vicarious participant. BTW Anna Marie Villafranche's prose and descriptions of the love scenes can span 10 to 20 pages as she is a master in drawing out those delicious sinfull moments. It's not the hump and bump of many of our contemporary authors ....

I had some trouble finding this book and I can assure you it's not leaving my little library of erotic masterpieces any time soon .....

Words fail to describe the artistry and the passion Anne-Marie Villefranche uses to tell these erotic tales of mischief in 18th and 19th century France. You must read this book!

My Husband and I visited Houston, San Antonio & Austin, we only had a couple of weeks in which to fit in as much as we could. This book was a brilliant way to get the most from a short time. It helped us to enjoy our visit to the full. We hope to visit more of the USA and shall certainly use this type of book again.

I really enjoyed using Day Trips from San Antonio and Austin to plan several recent weekend excursions. I found the book very helpful and used it to plan a trip to Corpus Christi and another to the Hill Country. Even though I have lived in this area for over 20 years, I found many hidden treasures thanks to this guide!

Nova Hall's "Spirit and Creator" presents a new and intriguing look at the design and construction of Charles Lindbergh's amazing plane, the "Spirit of St. Louis." Built in an astounding 60 days, the "Spirit" was a unique and, this book makes clear, radical aircraft designed for one goal: to make a flight from New York to Paris possible.

Although the story of the creation of the "Spirit of St. Louis" has hardly remained a secret, many details concerning its design have been obscure. Until now. One day in 1998 Nova Hall, the grandson of "Spirit" designer Donald A. Hall, discovered a locked trunk in his family's garage. Once it was pried open, the trunk revealed a literal treasure-trove of photographs, documents, and film footage of the plane during construction and in flight. This amazing book presents these materials with explanatory text, and does a great deal to clarify the historical record.

It is clear, after reading the book, that Donald Hall's design for the "Spirit" was the creation of a remarkable genius. Certainly Lindbergh contributed a great deal to the plane (biographer Scott Berg has noted that it was literally "a glove for Lindbergh's hands"), but it was Hall who came up with most of the innovative design. It's simplicity, apparent in a series of never-before-seen photos of the naked airframe, belies the complex challenges that faced Hall. That he was able to deliver a complete aircraft in a mere sixty days -- a time frame that did not even allow him to produce proper blueprints or pre-assemble many components -- makes clear that Lindbergh's arrival in Paris was a triumph not only for this pilot, but for the designer of his machine. As the title of the book implies, Lindbergh had the dream, and it took Hall's know-how and perserverence to create the plane that would make its fulfillment possible.

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in Lindbergh, and especially for anyone who would like to know more about the nuts and bolts of the "Spirit." The text is well-written and, while somewhat spare, it presents a highly reverential account of the life of Hall and his work on history's most famous plane (Wright Flyer notwithstanding). The photographs are amazing, and there are hundreds of them, some culled from extremely rare and precious nitrate motion picture film prints.

Bought this for my husband who loves aircraft. But, I loved the book as I love history when told through correspondence and photos. My husband was born in 1926 so this will be a book we pass on to our son so he will be aware of the time period.

... you will love Sarah. And you will hate her. :) We've all known women like this one. They do the most horrible things, sometimes in the name of the Lord, and then they repent and start all over again.

No matter how you feel about Sarah, you just have to keep turning the pages to see what she'll do next. And now that I'm done with this book, I'm waiting for another. Ms Paris?

In the meantime, I'm lending this one to my friends. Not all of them, mind you. Just the ones I know will "get it."

Oh, and if you're from the South, this one will grab you. Patricia Paris is Southern from head to toe, and so is her Sarah.

I too enjoyed this book. It brought me into a completely different place, that I am not accustomed to and loved every minute of it. I highly recommend it!

A friend passed the book, The Spiritual Side of Sarah, to me and said, "You'll love this. It's about the funniest book I ever read about a girl in the South - and she's from here!" Then, knowing I love books about small Southern towns and that I'm a nostalgic freak, she added, "It's got lots of things about this area, back in the 40's and 50's" And the main character's a real hoot!"
I was hooked from the first page. Yes, I laughed lots of times, just as my friend had, but when I peered underneath the obvious, I thought I glimpsed a Sarah that wanted to be different. She also reminded me of several Sarah's I had known in my time.
As the story unfolded and Sarah's many sides were brought up for a closer view, I realized that Sarah was more complex, quite different from the girl in the early pages who simply had to have her way.
Patricia Paris has an uncanny ability to take readers along each twist of turn of the road, all the while allowing them to feel, touch, taste and smell. Her descriptions give readers the full picture and, therefore, the whole experience. I could feel the spirit moving in some of her church scenes. There was just the right amount of sex to hold the interest of some and not offend others and these scenes were delivered tastefully. Ms. Paris leads her readers into the room and then lures them, with a few leading words, into allowing their own imagination to complete the scene. I found the author's writing style very unique and very impressive.
I had the pleasure of buying my own autographed copy and meeting Patricia Paris recently at a B. Dalton book signing in Knoxville. Ms. Paris was very warm and friendly and I was pleased to see the way she showed an open gratitude to her book readers. I was surprised and disappointed when she told me she had been writing most of her life but had tossed all her stories away until recently when she finally decided to start publishing them instead.
She promised a sequel to The Spiritual Side of Sarah and I can't wait to see where her character goes next.
I have now started Ms. Paris' first book, the thought-provoking Connections, and recognized instantly her storytelling style with its occasional twinges of wry humor.
Southerners, you'll love The Spiritual Side of Sarah.

I read this book after I read "Lila Says" by Chimo. These books are both similar in setting. It was a depressing but accurate description of life in the arab populated Paris ghettos. The value of life, the dead end feeling, and the chaos and feeling of hopelessness was depicted like I have never read before. The characters seemed real and the surroundings were easy to picture, very vivid. And you felt for everyone in the book especially the families who came to France for a better life and received something far worse- destruction of their culture, detrioration of their children, rascism, and the feeling of leaving a whole familiar world behind and being trapped in a concrete world. more than enyting it also has french characters too that are within the same situation. It is very much telling of the immigrant experience anywhere for arabs- they leave an opressive regime where they are poor and want better and think they are going to have an incredible life some where else, so they leave their country, their language, and their family behind in search. what they find is a world in repulsion with theirs where they are very different and it is hard to survive and with this everything they know is gone and their children are different from they are and feel even more disconnected from their surroundings and their parents world. Well written.

Tea in the Harem is an excellent account of life in the slums of Paris. It is at times disturbingly real and deals with Foreigners trying to make a go of it in the mean streets of France. I liked it because it reveals another side of Paris; a bleak, dirty, and dangerous side not often dealt with in books and movies. Anyone who has an interest in racial conflict and poverty will find this book enlightening. If you like tea, and you like harems, then you'll love Tea in the Harem.

A first novel by a true adventure author. Stephens has taken years to write this novel but its reading will be like today and tomorrow. Astronauts and land and sea lubbers will appreciate the frustrations of America's first Astronaut who can't fly again but finds love and life in Paris. The Seine and the Tour Eiffel. A great setting for those with a love for Paris and France. Reviewed by Dave and Connie Pryor.

When John Glenn made his epic space flight in 1962, like all Americans, I was thrilled. Then came disappointed when NASA grounded him, for the president thought he was too big a hero to risk another mission. Soon after Glenn retired from the Marines, greatly disappointed, and I felt his anguish.

The incident gave me thought for The Tower & The River. What if Glenn hadn't resigned and decided to fight the system? Of course, I wrote my novel before Glenn decided to go back in space. In the novel I send Glenn, or Major Grant Thompson, USMC, as I called him, to Paris to join the office of the Naval Attache for propaganda reasons. His desire to return to space is the conflict that he has to resolve.

The Orchises Press edition stands out for three reasons. The first is that it reproduces--with impressive attention to detail--the first edition of Joyce's novel. The second reason is that the large, widemargined pages add the pleasure of reading to the pleasure of reading Ulysses (there is something missing, after all, in the insubstantial, tinytype levity of the paperback editions). Finally, the weight of the paper, the strength of the binding makes this edition one that will last (and you will not, as with the paperback editions, be forced to transcripe all your notes from a book that falls apart after three readings). For those who seek the "authenticity" of a first edition, who admire Joyce or who will be studying the novel for years to come, this is the edition to buy.

This is a wonderfully crafted book -- the physical object, that is, and not just the text. (Because if you're willing to pay this much for a copy of "Ulysses" you obviously take that for granted.) The volume is larger in size than typical hardcover books today, meaning that the type is a decent readable size and the margins are generous (for the note jotting fiends among us). Great care has clearly been taken in the choice of paper and the sewn binding, which allows the book to lay flat during reading and insures years of re-reading. Although there is no dustjacket the cover is made of very durable material; various cover protectors can be found to stand in or, for the really paranoid, a slipcase can be made or found. It should be added that the text is presented as originally published, so there are no notes or glosses to help the first-time or casual reader; neither are the episodes keyed to any of the line numberings found in other editions. However, those wishing to refer to notes would be best off buying one of the helpful readers' companions by Gifford or Blamires anyway. In relation to other available editions, this one occupies a vast middle ground between the throwaway mass-market paperbacks on the one hand and the out-of-reach collectors' editions on the other. The book's durability and elegant though understated presentation should prove most attractive to those readers who intend to read the text again and again, whether for pleasure or for study. In short, this volume is a keeper.

Venus Bound is one chapter in the story of censorship in the 20th century. It tells the story of Olympia Press, a small publishing company in Paris, and its owner Maurice Girodias. More importantly, this book relates how some of the classics of 20th century literature got published in the 1950s, a time when censorship of sexually explicit writing made it impossible for these works to be published in either the UK or the USA.

The subtitle of this work states that the book is about the press and its writers. Sadly, Maurice Girodias, who was writing the second volume of his autobiography at the time, refused to be interviewed by John De St. Jorre. So although the book is about Girodias and his life's work, there is a sense of detachment to the book. Questions that Girodias could easily have answered are answered indirectly or not at all. Yet this treatment allows a complex vision of Girodias to appear as his actions and motivations are described by the authors and employees of Olympia Press.

Olympia Press made money by commissioning erotic novels from English-speaking writers in Paris who were in need of an income. These were sold under pseudonyms to a readership in the USA and UK where such books were illegal. If that was all Olympia Press did, it would probably have faded away into obscurity with the liberalization of the laws of censorship.

However, Olympia Press was the only publisher at that time that would risk publishing much more substantive novels that couldn't be published elsewhere because of censorship. Whole chapters of Venus Bound are devoted to the stories behind the publication of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Story of O by Dominique Aury (under the pseudonym Pauline Reage), and William Burrough's Naked Lunch.

This is a fascinating book about a mysterious and excitable Maurice Girodias who battles the censors and his own writers in court to maintain the Olympia Press. Although this is a book about erotica, the treatment is scholarly and there is nothing here that will offend any but the most sensitive readers. It will appeal to those who have an interest in the history of censorship or who want more information on any of the works published by Olympia Press. At the end of the book are a Chronology, a Olympia Press List of titles, and a Bibliography.

This is the book that changed my life and got me interested in literature. I ended up reading so many other books because of this book. In my life,this was the book that changed it all. Will it work for anyone else? Probably

Having read VINCENT VAN GOGH AND THE PAINTERS OF THE PETIT BOULEVARD, I regret I did not get to the exhibt in Saint Louis or Frankfurt where it closed in September 2001. This lovely book was created as an exhibition catalogue, but one does not need to have seen the exhibition to benefit from reading the informative essays or looking at copies of beautiful works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and other memebers of the self-styled "Petit Boulevard" artists group.

Essays on topics related to the subject are preceded by text written by the editor and exhibit curator, Cornelia Homberg, ("Vincent van Gogh's Avant-Garde Strategies"). Homberg suggests the 'petit boulevard' was both an avant garde artistic movement following the Impressionists and an actual commercial location in Paris at the end of the 19th Century. The Exhibit featured works by members of the avant garde group (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, Toulous-Latrec, Anquetin, Bernard and others "petit" artists).

Homberg challenges the notion that Vincent van Gogh always worked alone and that his art was a "one-off" as other critics have suggested. She says Van Gogh was a member of an artists colony located in the vicinity rue Lepic where he lived with his brother Theo (Montmartre area), that he may have coined the phrase "Petit Boulevard" (he discussed it with Theo in their letters following his removal to Arles), and he saw himself as a leader of this innovative group (which he hoped to bring to Arles as a "brotherhood" of artists).

In his essay entitled "The Cultural Geography of the Petit Boulevard" Richard Thomas describes the material dimensions of the place and time within which the "petit boulevard" artists worked. He describes the "off-off-Broadway/Bourbon Street" atmosphere of the bohemian artistic community -- a proletarian territory dominated by factories, caberets, taverns, le circque, brothels, and other down scale establishments (Chat Noir, Molin Rouge) where 'decadent iconograpy' was born. He says artists such as Toulouse Latrec, Steinlin, Willith, and others developed commercial prints depicting this mileau.

In the third essay, Elizabeth Childs describes the escape of Gauguin and Seurat to Pont Aven and Van Gogh to Arles following their Paris adventures. Here the artists hoped to reconnect with the timeless cycles of nature and leave the crass, commercial, class-ridden city behind. Childs says once Gauguin reached Pont Aven, the Celtic Catholic nature of Brittany spurred Gauguin to develop a medieval stain-glass cloisonnist style of art. She contrasts Gauguin's work with Van Gogh's 'rural' art which he based on a love of Japanese prints (by Hiroshege and others) and what he fancied to be Japanese culture, as well as the Barbizon style which included Daumier and Millet. In the last essay, John House discusses landscapes by Van Gogh (who influenced by his Dutch predecessor Rembrandt and the French Millet) as well as other artists of the period including Gauguin.

The book is filled beautiful reproductions of the paintings and other works included in the Exhibit (prints and photographs of the various items of art, the people involved, and the places they lived and worked). Sadly, one would have to do quite a bit of traveling to recapitulate the Exhibit, and then the synergistic effect would be missing. On the other hand, the book is a solid testament to the art that followed Impressionism. Although I had seen many of the paintings in their home museums (National Gallery, Chicago Art Institute, D'Orsay, Van Gogh Museum, etc.) I had not seen some of the works in private hands, nor the photographs of the period. This book is a valuable addition to my collection.

The Impressionist movement never really impressed me until I went and experienced this exhibit. This book is a great companion to the exhibit, going into much greater detail than the audio tour did, but can be equally appreciated (as a stand alone art history text) if you couldn't make it to St. Louis. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for information on some of the lesser known impressionists (those of the Petit Boulevard), as well as information on this brief period in van Gogh's life.

This is the best guide for people who want to know where to go before they get there. I love the guide for its listings of the best young and hip places to go. The guide covers every area of information needed for travel.

I picked up this Virgin guide for a recent trip to Paris, along with about 4 others. Had I known how excellent this guide was, I would've saved my money and purchased this one alone. I have been a long time fan of Fodor's CityPack guides, but the Virgin guides blow those out of the water. The Virgin guides (I have the London one as well) break the cities down by district and include ALL the hot-spots and must-see attractions. The map was indispensible to me; it has all the higglety-pigglety streets and landmarks noted for day on one side and night on the other. I didn't get lost once, and used the Metro line map all the time. The size is simple to carry with you, and the reccomended shops, restaurants, and insider tips won't fail you. Honestly, there is no need to buy all those other guides, because this one is all you need.