Literary Landscapes Paris

From Feydeau to Fitzgerald, from Hugo to Hemingway, the Paris locations that have influenced modern literature

A photographic stroll around the bookshops, famous literary restaurants and storied streets of Europe’s favourite tourist destination

Literary Landscapes: Paris takes this major European city and with picture perfect photography, compiles an album of memorable views linked to the words of Parisian authors, or writers who made Paris their home. It looks at places where books were written, discussed over dinner, and where ultimately the books are sold. It’s a picture book with words, not a words book with pictures.

There are the theatres of Molière, Dumas and Feydeau along with the incredible Palais Garnier opera house and the legend of Le Fantome by Gaston Leroux.

There are the revered bookshops of the Latin Quarter including the idiosyncratic Shakespeare & Co.

There are the classic grand structures referenced in Victor Hugo novels (and still there) or the mean streets of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris.

There are the famous cafes where authors gathered and wrote, or where artists and philosophers argued: Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, Le Procope, La Closerie de Lilas, Prunier, Le Dome, La Rotonde and Le Select.

There are the bouquinistes ranged in their green booths along the Seine, as once tended by Jean Genet. And there is the classic expatraiate Paris of Joyce, Stein, Wilde, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Beat poets.

Literary Landscapes: Paris takes readers on an exclusive cultural journey, guided by one of the city’s most engaging tourist guides.

About the author

Sandrine Voillet is a French art historian, tour leader and TV presenter. After obtaining an MA in Art History at the École du Louvre in Paris, she worked in the arts sector in different roles, including work as a curator for a private art collection. In 2007 she presented a three-part BBC series on the cultural history of Paris, Sandrine’s Paris, with an accompanying book that detailed the art and literary highlights from over three centuries of the City of Light. In 2012 she started a bespoke tour company, leading visitors in the footsteps of artists and poets such as Charles Baudelaire, who invented the term flaneur, or to Montmartre and Le Bateau Lavoir, the birthplace of Cubism. She makes frequent appearances on the History Channel and National Geographic, talking about affaires culturel in the city that has contributed so much to the development of art and literature.