From 1900 to 1930, Montparnasse was the center of artistic life for the whole world. Now this major contribution to the social and cultural history of the period -- with its informative text and hundreds of photographs -- is available in paperback once again.

“A master spy novelist.”—The Wall Street Journal “Page after page is dazzling.”—James Patterson NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Late summer, 1938. Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie. The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich has been waging political warfare against France, and for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service run out of the American embassy. Mission to Paris is filled with heart-stopping tension, beautifully drawn scenes of romance, and extraordinarily alive characters: foreign assassins; a glamorous Russian actress-turned-spy; and the women in Stahl’s life. At the center of the novel is the city of Paris—its bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it were their last. Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe. Praise for Mission to Paris “The most talented espionage novelist of our generation.”—Vince Flynn “Vividly re-creates the excitement and growing gloom of the City of Light in 1938–39 . . . It doesn’t get more action-packed and grippingly atmospheric than this.”—The Boston Globe “One of [Furst’s] best . . . This is the romantic Paris to make a tourist weep. . . . In Furst’s densely populated books, hundreds of minor characters—clerks, chauffeurs, soldiers, whores—all whirl around his heroes in perfect focus for a page or two, then dot by dot, face by face, they vanish, leaving a heartbreaking sense of the vast Homeric epic that was World War II and the smallness of almost every life that was caught up in it.”—The New York Times Book Review “A book no reader will put down until the final page . . . Critics compare [Alan] Furst to Graham Greene and John le Carré [as] a master of historical espionage.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Alan Furst’s writing reminds me of a swim in perfect water on a perfect day, fluid and exquisite. One wants the feeling to go on forever, the book to never end. . . . Furst is one of the finest spy novelists working today.”—Publishers Weekly

A dazzling portrait of Paris’s forgotten artist and cabaret star, whose incandescent life asks us to see the history of modern art in new ways. In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir—featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway—made front-page news in France and was immediately banned in America. All before she turned thirty. Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray’s legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote? Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a café. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Ray’s reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. The works they made together, including the Surrealist icons Le Violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche, now set records at auction. Charting their volatile relationship, award-winning historian Mark Braude illuminates for the first time Kiki’s seminal influence not only on Man Ray’s art, but on the culture of 1920s Paris and beyond. As provocative and magnetically irresistible as Kiki herself, Kiki Man Ray is the story of an exceptional life that will challenge ideas about artists and muses—and the lines separating the two.

“[An] epic account of life and loves among artists and writers in Paris from belle époque to world slump.” —William Feaver, The Spectator A legendary capital of the arts, Paris hosted some of the most legendary developments in world culture—particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the flowering of fauvism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism. In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a vivid and magical tour of the Paris of 1900–1930, a hotbed of artistic creation where we encounter Apollinaire, Modigliani, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, working, loving, and struggling to stay afloat. Sixteen pages of black-and-white illustrations are featured. “Franck spins lavish historical, biographical, artistic, and even scandalous details into a narrative that will captivate both serious and casual readers . . . Marvelous and informative.” —Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal

"This may be the most original cross-species love story I've ever read. Part travelogue, part recovery memoir, and one hundred percent compelling." —Gwen Cooper, author of the New York Times bestselling Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat "[An] epiphany-provoking gem of a story, skillfully crafted, vivid and rich with feeling." —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood "A stunning, exceptional memoir from a woman who truly understands and appreciates birds . . . A captivating, heart-warming tale and a delightful, inspiring read." —Joanna Burger, author of The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship An avian expert and poet shares a true story of beloved birds, a remarkable grandfather, a bad-girl youth—and an astonishing redemption Nikki Moustaki, author of The Bird Market of Paris, grew up in 1980s Miami, the only child of parents who worked, played, and traveled for luxury sports car dealerships. At home, her doting grandmother cooked for and fed her, but it was her grandfather—an evening-gown designer, riveting storyteller, and bird expert—who was her mentor and dearest companion. Like her grandfather, Nikki fell hard for birds. "Birds filled my childhood," she writes, "as blue filled the sky." Her grandfather showed her how to hypnotize chickens, sneak up on pigeons, and handle baby birds. He gave her a white dove to release for luck on each birthday. And he urged her to, someday, visit the bird market of Paris. But by the time Nikki graduated from college and moved to New York City, she was succumbing to alcohol and increasingly unable to care for her flock. When her grandfather died, guilt-ridden Nikki drank even more. In a last-ditch effort to honor her grandfather, she flew to France hoping to visit the bird market of Paris to release a white dove. Instead, something astonishing happened there that saved Nikki's life.

Paris has long been a storied center of art and culture, and of romance, but in the 1920s its magnetism was especially irresistible. From around the world writers, artists, and composers steamed in, to visit or linger, some to reside. For travelers, Francophiles and the curious, this gossipy retrospective of expatriate life in Paris in the 1920s is a mosaic of quick glimpses—Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in a coffin to overcome her fear of death, Igor Stravinsky diving through a huge wreath at the premiere of his ballet Les Noces, Ford Madox Ford meeting Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes near starvation, Josephine Baker establishing her nightclub. The list of expatriates is long and luminous, and this book—a work of immense erudition spiced with anecdotes and gossip—documents their haunts and habits, their comings and goings, their relationships intimate and artistic. Structured in thirty-three geographical and very walkable sections, Expatriate Paris is cross-referenced by streets, names, and topics and equipped with nine maps to satisfy the most demanding traveler, whether real or armchair.

When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Années folles, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of war to find that a new world greeted them—one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior. The epicenter of all this creativity, as well as of the era’s good times, was Montparnasse, where impoverished artists and writers found colleagues and cafés, and tourists discovered the Paris of their dreams. Major figures on the Paris scene—such as Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Proust—continued to hold sway, while others now came to prominence—including Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and Josephine Baker, as well as André Citroën, Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the irrepressible Kiki of Montparnasse. Paris of the 1920s unquestionably sizzled. Yet rather than being a decade of unmitigated bliss, les Années folles also saw an undercurrent of despair as well as the rise of ruthless organizations of the extreme right, aimed at annihilating whatever threatened tradition and order—a struggle that would escalate in the years ahead. Through rich illustrations and evocative narrative, Mary McAuliffe brings this vibrant era to life.

The first biography of the enigmatic dadaist known as "the Baroness"—Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars. In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century.

This elegantly written book describes the evolving perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin, and London. As Joachim Schlör shows, the lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night for both those who toiled at work and those who caroused in restaurants, pubs, and cafes. Nights in the Big City explores this change and offers a stirring portrait of the secrets and mysteries a city can hold when the sun goes down. Sifting through countless police and church archives alongside first-hand accounts, Schlör sets out on his own explorations with a head full of histories, exploring the boulevards and side-streets of these three great capitals. Illustrated with haunting and evocative photographs by, among others, Bill Brandt and André Kertész, and filled with contemporary literary references, Nights in the Big City is a milestone in the cultural history of the city.

Paris, 1929. For Harris Stuyvesant, his current assignment is a private investigator's dream - he's getting paid to trawl the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, looking for a pretty young woman. The missing person in question is Philippa Crosby, a twenty-two-year-old from Boston, whose family have become alarmed at her lack of communication. As Stuyvesant follows Philippa's trail through Paris, he finds that she is known to many of its famous - and infamous - inhabitants, from Shakespeare and Company's Sylvia Beach to the surrealist photographer Man Ray. But when the evidence leads Stuyvesant to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, his investigation takes a sharp and disturbing turn.