"We think of Honore Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy stand many shorter works, and it's here that we get some of his most daring explorations of crime, sexuality, and artistic creation. As Marcel Proust noted, it is in these tales that we detect, under the surface, the mysterious...

"The French may not have invented love but they perfected it, and the laboratory in which they did so was Paris. James Joyce called the city "a lamp for lovers, hung in the wood of the world." From medieval times, Paris has drawn those who wish to experience the limits of love-intellectual, spiritual, carnal. In Love Is in the Air of Paris John Baxter turns the spotlight on some of them, from the medieval troubadors who seduced court ladies with flowery...

"A beguiling memoir of a childhood in 1950s Fontainebleau from the much-admired New York Times bestselling author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. For a young American boy in the 1950s, Fontainebleau was a sight both strange and majestic, home to a continual series of adventures: a different language to learn, weekend visits to nearby Paris, family road trips to Spain and Italy. Then there was the chateau itself: a sprawling palace once the residence...