A glamorous New Yorker leaves her lavish life to start over in Paris.

A glamorous fish-out-of-water first novel, Paris Hangover stars Klein, a just-escaped New Yorker with trunk-fulls of fabulous footwear but without the significant relationship she'd really expected and longed to have by now, in her mid-thirties. Fleeing a live-in lover and their sleek Tribeca triplex as well as a career in fashion, Klein stars over in Paris-in a tiny walk-up in the 6th that she had to lie (in broken Franglais) and write a bad check to get, only to discover that, among other things, Parisian apartments don't come with kitchens. Living out of her ten piece of (Louis Vuitton, natch) luggage, Klein plunges into the mysterious world of French men and dating. She muddles her way through: the sexy Renaud, the prototypical Frenchman; dating three men named Jean simultaneously; and one completely wrong Monsieur Married Man, who wants Klein for his very well-kept mistress. Set against a backdrop of knowing references to Paris and its unique manners and mores, Paris Hangover is ultimately a very satisfying modern romance as Klein falls-- possibly permanently--for the least likely man to catch her eye.

A satisfying and very modern romance, American Alexandra Ward becomes the it girl of Paris. But life as the citys reigning courtesan gets more complicated and she begins to reconsider whether the good life is really that good after all.

Is it possible to maintain chic as a single-mom-to-be in a city where it's all supposed to be effortless and breastfeeding is a horreur? Does one live by the Parisienne's pregnancy plan of smoking, drinking, and cheese-eating avec vin blanc, but jamais jamais gain more than six kilos? And how to handle a pickup attempt by a married man in the baby department of Bon Marché when you're eight months along? After all, American girls do things differently: Lamaze class and baby showers, sensible prenatal care and...family to watch you proudly grow more and more pregnant. Paris is full of delights for a new mom: the Luxembourg Gardens, baby boutiques too precious to be passed by, a petit brioche for a teething tot. But home exerts a powerful pull. Should your child grow up skipping by the Seine or scampering up a tree house? Should it be "Mommy" or "Maman"? And can a tall blonde with a taste for Veuve Cliquot and Vuitton ever make it in the land of mom jeans and Happy Meals? Paris, Baby! is novelist Kirsten Lobe's warm, funny memoir about Paris, Frenchmen, friendship, babies, and making it on one's own.

Spirits are all the rage today. Two-thirds of Americans drink, whether they enjoy higher priced call brands or more moderately priced favorites. From fine dining and piano bars to baseball games and backyard barbeques, drinks are part of every social occasion. In The Prohibition Hangover, Garrett Peck explores the often-contradictory social history of alcohol in America, from the end of Prohibition in 1933 to the twenty-first century. For Peck, Repeal left American society wondering whether alcohol was a consumer product or a controlled substance, an accepted staple of social culture or a danger to society. Today the legal drinking age, binge drinking, the neoprohibitionist movement led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Granholm v. Heald that rejected discriminatory curbs on wine sales, the health benefits of red wine, advertising, and other issues remain highly contested. Based on primary research, including hundreds of interviews with those on all sidesùclergy, bar and restaurant owners, public health advocates, citizen crusaders, industry representatives, and moreùas well as secondary sources, The Prohibition Hangover provides a panoramic assessment of alcohol in American culture. Traveling through the California wine country, the beer barrel backroads of New England and Pennsylvania, and the blue hills of Kentucky's bourbon trail, Peck places the concerns surrounding alcohol use within the broader context of American history, religious traditions, and governance. Society is constantly evolving, and so are our drinking habits. Cutting through the froth and discarding the maraschino cherries, The Prohibition Hangover examines the modern American temperament toward drink amid the $189-billion-dollar-a-year industry that defines itself by the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

DIVDIVIn the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950s/divDIV One of America’s most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which followed a year later, paint a colorful landscape of Rorem’s world and its famous inhabitants, as well as a fascinating self-portrait of a footloose young artist unabashedly drinking deeply of life. In this amalgam of forthright personal reflections and cogent social commentary, unprecedented for its time, Rorem’s anecdotal recollections of the decade from 1951 to 1961 represent Gay Liberation in its infancy as the author freely expresses his open sexuality not as a revelation but as a simple fact of life./divDIV /divDIVAt once blisteringly honest and exquisitely entertaining, Rorem’s diaries expound brilliantly on the creative process, following their peripatetic author from Paris to Morocco to Italy and back home to America as he crosses paths with Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Boulez, and other luminaries of the era. /divDIV /divWith consummate skill and unexpurgated insight, a younger, wilder Rorem reflects on a bygone time and culture and, in doing so, holds a revealing mirror to himself. /div

The hidden truth about the French way of life: it's all about seduction—its rules, its pleasures, its secrets France is a seductive country, seductive in its elegance, its beauty, its sensual pleasures, and its joie de vivre. But Elaine Sciolino, the longtime Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has discovered that seduction is much more than a game to the French: it is the key to understanding France. Seduction plays a crucial role in how the French relate to one another—not just in romantic relationships but also in how they conduct business, enjoy food and drink, define style, engage in intellectual debate, elect politicians, and project power around the world. While sexual repartee and conquest remain at the heart of seduction, for the French seduction has become a philosophy of life, even an ideology, that can confuse outsiders. In La Seduction, Sciolino gives us an inside view of how seduction works in all areas, analyzing its limits as well as its power. She demystifies the French way of life in an entertaining and personal narrative that carries us from the neighborhood shops of Paris to the halls of government, from the gardens of Versailles to the agricultural heartland. La Seduction will charm you and encourage you to lower your defenses about the French. Pull up a chair and let Elaine Sciolino seduce you.