Paris Café
The Select Crowd
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed author Noël Riley Fitch, abetted by noted artist Rick Tulka, serves the dish on Select, the famous Montparnasse café that for nearly nine decades has been so vital to Paris and its intellectual denizens: from Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton to the writers and artists who continue to work quietly there in the back room or heatedly debate every topic imaginable into the night. The artists have their work on the walls; the novelists include the café setting in their fiction. The quiet and drama of the Sélect world illustrates the centrality of cafés — particularly this one — to Parisian social, cultural, and intellectual life. Blending pithy profiles and witty drawings of clientele and staff, the book is organized around a history of the café, its daily and seasonal rhythms, particular colorful patrons, and even its typical café/brasserie food (including a few recipes).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This charming biography takes as its subject Le Select, a Paris cafe that thrived for eight decades as a "microcosm of the best of the coffeehouse tradition... and the human rhythm of a living place." Since the1920s, Le Select has been a favorite haunt for heroes and mavericks of the art world: Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway and Miro, Bill Murray and Kristin Scott-Thomas. But celebrities are just the first of Le Select's charms, revealed as "a small gem of a place" through brief looks at the characters who inhabit it, a number of telling anecdotes and brilliant illustration; Tulka's moody, exuberant caricatures of the waitstaff and the regular crowd are even better than the famous faces that precede them. Anyone with a soft spot for Paris or cafe culture will find much to love.