Le Divorce by Diane Johnson (Plume, $15). It's impossible to write a book set in Paris, during any era, without reading Johnson's marvelously incisive and hilarious take on French culture and on how we Americans try to understand it — and just as frequently get it all wrong.
Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (NYRB Classics, $16). Gallant was one of the most elegant, original, and precise prose stylists of all time. Her Paris stories go as deeply as any fiction ever has into all the darkest and brightest areas of the human psyche — and the human heart.
Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco (NYRB Classics, $16). Glassco moved to Paris in the 1920s, and his lightly fictionalized memoir captures the mood of the era. With its accounts of wild nights of partying with the famous and the infamous, it helps us imagine what it was like to be young and free in Paris at that time. It's like a much kinder and more generous version of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.
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