The Other Paris: An illustrated journey through a city's poor and Bohemian past

Product Description Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining, seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the wilfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, and in the culture of France itself. Richly illustrated with over three hundred images, The Other Paris reclaims the city from the modern bon vivants and speculators; scuttling through the knotted streets, through the whorehouses and dance halls, the knock-out shops and hobo shelters of the old city. Review Sante loves the lower depths, cutting his teeth a couple of decades ago with Lowlife, a book about crime and prostitution in bygone Manhattan. Now comes a book it feels as if he was born to write, about the underbelly of Paris, an extraordinary and sometimes appalling submersion in nostalgie de la boue and French social problems, which takes on an added gravity in the wake of recent tragic events. ― The Observer Sante is in a class by himself. -- Molly Haskell ― New York Times This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest book I have ever read about Paris. Ever. Thank you, Luc Sante. -- Paul Auster Moving and discursive. ― Economist A wonderfully rich book, packed with information, lively in style, evoking the turbulence of a vanished time and city. -- Allan Massie ― Wall Street Journal Nowadays, the old crowded, swarming, surly cities are at least half-forgotten. But in this great chronicle Luc Sante recalls when Paris was rougher, when the poor, the tough, the unregulated, the underworld, thrived there; maybe the city was also less rough, in that there was room for nearly everyone all the way down the social ladder. Hanging over The Other Paris is the contemporary curse of cities that perhaps hit Paris first, of cities that have become bland transnational stopping places for the privileged. Magisterial as ever, Sante returns us to the flavor, texture, savor, shouts, and clashes of the bygone city. -- Rebecca Solnit The Other Paris is a heartbreaking spectacle, immense in intellectual and political scope and emotional reach. Peopled by crooks and movie stars, gamblers and thinkers, the world's premiere city of dreams is rendered, through Luc Sante's fine hand, historian's eye, and poet's heart, into a place we hardly knew - a world of hitherto unknown mysteries and realities. A grand journey in an epic work. -- Hilton Als "We have forgotten what a city was," writes Luc Sante provocatively about Paris. By the last chapter of this absorbing book we are convinced. Washerwomen and rag pickers, bohemians and clochards, anarchists and apaches, all play their part in this alternative urban history. This is not the Gay Paree of Maurice Chevalier, though he too makes an appearance. -- Witold Rybczynski For anyone familiar with Sante's work, it should come as no surprise that the situationists function as a kind of animating spirit in The Other Paris ... The only way of getting to know a city, he means to tell us - or, for that matter, getting to know ourselves - is to wander, starting at the periphery rather than the center, to build by slow accretion, out of the details that resonate or stick. -- David L. Ulin ― Los Angeles Times Book Description A tour of the lost Paris of the last two centuries - poor, unvarnished and truly bohemian. About the Author Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. His other books include Low Life: Lures and Snares in Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He has contributed to