'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.

* Featured on the Virago website

About the Author

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 "Genet" and published various novels which include Men and Monuments (1957), Paris Was Yesterday (1972) and The Cubical City (1974).

Reviews
Janet Flanner's dispatches on Parisian literary and social scenes 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 & vivid gifts. Make yourself comfortable and order up a dry martini -- Robert Lacey
Lively and witty . . . fascinating escapist entertainment * Leeds Guide *
If you'd like to feel that you are in Les Deux Magots, or Cafe Fleur, listening to Sartre or Cocteau; if you'd like to hear the gossip about the gendarmerie asking Marlene Dietrich to leave Paris because she had the audacity to wear trousers in public or if you'd like to meet James Joyce in The Shakespear & Company Book Store; if you'd like to attend one of Gertrude Stein's intellectual discussions & meet her companion, Alice B. Toklas, then this book is for you * Amazon.com *
Lively and witty...fascinating escapist entertainment * Leeds Guide *



Book Information
ISBN 9781844080267
Author Janet Flanner
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Virago Press Ltd
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 250g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 128mm * 22mm