A Walk Through Paris

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Eric Hazan's elegant, characteristically learned account of his journey through contemporary Paris, written in a tone both intimate and authoritative, is at once a companionably unhurried evocation of the city's rich, radical past and-at a time when capital is dramatically reorganizing its topography-a bracingly urgent intervention in debates about the city's future. As André Breton might have observed, there really are no lost steps here. -Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking Praise for The Invention of Paris: This is a wondrous book, either to be read at home with a decent map, or carried about sur place through areas no tourists bother with. -Adam Thorpe, Guardian Hazan is all business. He trudges through Paris street by street, quoting what Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire or Kafka said about a particular spot, pointing out where barricades were once erected and thieves gathered for drinks. -Donald Morrison, Financial Times Hazan's brick-by-brick account of the city's history of strife and political posturing is riveting. -Publishers Weekly Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenization of international city development; he is also a passionate left-wing historian seeking to rescue the truth of Paris's revolutionary past. -Julian Barnes, London Review of Books