France in Mind: An Anthology

In her third literary Baedeker, Alice Leccese Powers–editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind–explores France through the senses and sensibilities of thirty-three British and American authors.

The food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France are described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists. From Gertrude Stein’s Paris to Ezra Pound’s Pyrenees; from Tobias Smollett, who grumbled, to Peter Mayle, who settled in; and from Edith Wharton on falling in love to David Sedaris on falling over French grammar–here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language.

Henry Adams • James Baldwin • Elizabeth Bishop • Mary Blume • James Fenimore Cooper • Charles Dickens • Lawrence Durrell • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • M. F. K. Fisher • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Janet Flanner • Adam Gopnik • Joanne Harris • Ernest Hemingway • Washington Irving • Henry James • Thomas Jefferson • Stanley Karnow • Peter Mayle • Mary McCarthy • Jan Morris • Ezra Pound • David Sedaris • Tobias Smollett • Gertrude Stein • Robert Louis Stevenson • Paul Theroux • Gillian Tindall • Calvin Trillin • Mark Twain • Edith Wharton • Richard Wilbur • William Carlos Williams

In her third literary Baedeker, Alice Leccese Powers–editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind–explores France through the senses and sensibilities of thirty-three British and American authors.

The food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France are described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists. From Gertrude Stein’s Paris to Ezra Pound’s Pyrenees; from Tobias Smollett, who grumbled, to Peter Mayle, who settled in; and from Edith Wharton on falling in love to David Sedaris on falling over French grammar–here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language.

Henry Adams • James Baldwin • Elizabeth Bishop • Mary Blume • James Fenimore Cooper • Charles Dickens • Lawrence Durrell • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • M. F. K. Fisher • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Janet Flanner • Adam Gopnik • Joanne Harris • Ernest Hemingway • Washington Irving • Henry James • Thomas Jefferson • Stanley Karnow • Peter Mayle • Mary McCarthy • Jan Morris • Ezra Pound • David Sedaris • Tobias Smollett • Gertrude Stein • Robert Louis Stevenson • Paul Theroux • Gillian Tindall • Calvin Trillin • Mark Twain • Edith Wharton • Richard Wilbur • William Carlos Williams

Publishers Weekly

Powers (editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind) does France in this collection of 33 letters, works of fiction and essays by British and American authors. The pieces stretch from the early 18th century to the present, but the omission of dates for some entries is frustrating. Dated or undated, itemized descriptions of sky, sea, vegetation and cathedrals can make for dry reading, as in the selections by Henry James and Ezra Pound. By contrast, the juiciest entries convey how being in that sensual country stamps out the conventions travelers sometimes bring. Most evocative are Adam Gopnik's excerpt from Paris to the Moon, which uses his wife's prenatal care in France to contrast cultural attitudes toward pregnancy, sex, parenthood and doctor's fashions; Ernest Hemingway's vignette of a starving writer's hunger from A Moveable Feast; David Sedaris's tale from Me Talk Pretty One Day, on the exasperation of learning to communicate in French; and, of course, the requisite Peter Mayle-who inspired so many to visit Provence that he himself had to flee-from A Year in Provence, on getting used to the French social ritual of kissing on the cheek. Earlier writings describing the desperation of poor Parisians before the French Revolution-Charles Dickens's broken wine cask scene from A Tale of Two Cities and Thomas Jefferson's 1780 letter to James Madison concerning his encounter with a destitute woman-do much to illustrate that era. A common thread runs throughout this mostly pleasant collection: as Powers puts it, "travelers in France are heavily freighted with the weight of home." Agent, Jane Dystel. (Mar. 11) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Alice Leccese Powers is the editor of the anthologies Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind, and co-editor of The Brooklyn Reader: Thirty Writers Celebrate America’s Favorite Borough. A freelance writer and editor, she has been published in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and many other newspapers and magazines. Ms. Powers also teaches writing at the Corcoran School of Art and Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three daughters.