Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light

Beautifully written and refreshingly original … makes us see [Paris] in a different light. -San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Swapping his native San Francisco for the City of Light, travel writer David Downie arrived in Paris in 1986 on a one-way ticket, his head full of romantic notions. Curiosity and the legs of a cross-country runner propelled him daily from an unheated, seventh-floor walk-up garret near the Champs-Elysees to the old Montmartre haunts of the doomed painter Modigliani, the tombs of Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the luxuriant alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens and the aristocratic Ile Saint-Louis midstream in the Seine.

Downie wound up living in the chic Marais district, married to the Paris-born American photographer Alison Harris, an equally incurable walker and chronicler. Ten books and a quarter-century later, he still spends several hours every day rambling through Paris, and writing about the city he loves. An irreverent, witty romp featuring thirty-one short prose sketches of people, places and daily life, Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light ranges from the glamorous to the least-known corners and characters of the world’s favorite city.

Photographs by Alison Harris.

Praise for Paris, Paris

I loved his collection of essays and anyone who’s visited Paris in the past, or plans to visit in the future, will be equally charmed as well. -David Lebovitz, author of The Sweet Life in Paris

[A] quirky, personal, independent view of the city, its history and its people -Mavis Gallant

Gives fresh poetic insight into the city … a voyage into ‘the bends and recesses, the jagged edges, the secret interiors’ [of Paris]. -Departures