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as well.) Novogrod describes the book as presenting “a view of the country’s pleasures that is at once panoramic and highly selective—pastoral, coastal, urban, encompassing both the old and the new.” If you clip articles like I do, you might not feel you need this book, but even though I have all these original articles in my files, I’m still glad I bought this volume—it’s far handier than searching through my massive files and, as I don’t often save an article’s accompanying photographs, it’s nice to see them here. Included in this collection are pieces on Paris, Versailles, the Loire Valley, the Paris Ritz, Normandy, and Coco Chanel.

FICTION

The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry: From Nerval to Valéry in English Translation, edited by Angel Flores, with an introduction by Patti Smith (Anchor, 2000).

The Blessing, Don’t Tell Alfred, and The Pursuit of Love, all by Nancy Mitford, all recently published in paperback editions by Vintage (2010). As Zoe Heller writes in her foreword to The Pursuit of Love, “It was, of course, Nancy who started it all. Without her, there would be no Mitford industry.” Mitford’s legendary British family is truly the stuff of novels, and she often based the characters in her eight novels on members of her family. She was the eldest of six sisters, one of whom was notoriously smitten with Hitler and who committed suicide shortly after Britain declared war against Germany, so Mitford had no shortage of intimate material. She was born in 1904, and in the 1920s, when she began writing novels, she was friends with Evelyn Waugh and others in his literary circle. Mitford moved to France in 1946 and remained there for the rest of her life, and her novels remind me of those by Barbara Pym, whose books I also love, in that the characters are so eccentric, quirky, and very British; but the reason these novels appear here is because each has a French or Parisian connection. Mitford’s biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Louis XIV are held in high regard (though I’m sorry to say I have yet to read them). More details about her work and her life may be found at Nancymitford.com.

Complete Poems: Blaise Cendrars (University of California Press, 1993). Fans of Cendrars (né Frédéric Louis Sauser) will be pleased to know about a unique and wonderful book published by Yale University Press in 2009: a facsimile of La Prose du Transsibérien, a poem originally published in 1913 with accompanying artwork by a favorite painter of mine, Sonia Delaunay. This facsimile comes in a little package with a booklet of the English translation and a foldout of the poem (in French), and is modeled after an original copy of the work held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The original edition unfolds to over six feet in length, and as translator Timothy Young notes, “If 150 copies were laid end to end they would be as tall as the Eiffel Tower.” Young explains this work “is noted today as much for its lyric beauty as for its unmatched composition of colors by Sonia Delaunay (née Terk),” and the intensity of the pigments survive in the Beinecke copy “with an astonishing vibrancy.”

The Château, William Maxwell (Knopf, 1961).

French Folktales, Henri Pourrat, selected by C. G. Bjurström, translated and with an introduction by Royall Tyler (Pantheon, 1989). One hundred and five legends culled from the rural provinces of France, which are, as Tyler writes in the introduction, “stories to eat with your pocketknife, among friends. They are delicious, and the days they taste of will never come again.”

France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion

Whereabouts Press, based in Berkeley, California, has recently introduced a series I’m crazy about called the Traveler’s Literary Companions. As travel writer Jan Morris asks, “What could be more instructive for the traveler—and more fun!—than to see a country through the eyes of its own most imaginative writers?” And the neat people at Whereabouts (I just know they’re neat) remind us that “good stories reveal as much, or more, about a locale as any map or guidebook.