Through the eyes of Miss Toklas, Gertrude Stein reviews both of their lives before their meeting and during their years of companionship.

The author passes a little storefront in Paris every day and finally enters to find a shop filled with dismantled pianos where, on Fridays, local people gather to discuss music, love, and life over a glass of wine.

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than...

An American aristocrat--a descendant of founding father John Jay--Susan Mary Alsop (1918-2004) knew absolutely everyone and brought together the movers and shakers of not just the United States, but the world. Henry Kissinger remarked that more agreements were concluded in her living room than in the White House. In 1945 Susan Mary joined her first husband, a young diplomat, in Paris, where she was at the center of the postwar diplomatic social circuit,...

"It's 1903. Nora Kelly, twenty-four, is talented, outspoken, progressive, and climbing the ladder of opportunity, until she falls for an attractive but dangerous man who sends her running back to the Old World her family had fled. Nora takes on Paris, mixing with couturiers, artists, and 'les femmes Americaines' of the Left Bank such as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. But when she stumbles into the centuries-old Collège des Irlandais, a good-looking...