After Stalin died a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes. Soviet citizens invested these imports with political and personal significance, transforming them into intimate possessions. Eleonory Gilburd reveals how Western culture defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, its death, and afterlife.

How to Die in Paris is an edgy, poetic, often darkly comic, memoir of a young middle-class black woman who escapes a tortured past in New York to pursue a new life in Europe—only to find herself broke, desperate, and contemplating suicide on the streets of Paris. Penniless, scared, and hoping for rescue, Thomas turns to a series of unlikely male suitors: an impoverished Italian who exposes her to the reality of immigrant struggle, a fast-talking squatter who lures her into Paris’s street youth culture, and a beautiful Tunisian who takes her home . . . only to introduce her to a world of pain. Each encounter awakens in her memories from her childhood—memories of the abuse and racism she experienced at the hands of her mother—and forces her to confront the darkness in her past, even as she struggles to survive in the present. Though the trials she faces in Paris are often harrowing, Thomas is anything but self-pitying, often culling humor from gritty moments, and she finds goodness in the small blessings that come her way: a library that offers warmth and escape, a sandwich abandoned in a phone booth, the generosity of strangers, and especially, the wonder of Paris itself. Ultimately, being homeless in the City of Light frees her of the denial and defenses that have been holding her back all her life—revealing a broader world too beautiful to leave.

From the Roman Emperor Julian, who waxed rhapsodic about Parisian wine and figs, to Henry Miller, who relished its seductive bohemia, Paris has been a perennial source of fascination for 2,000 years. In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth-century Impressionist painters, and much more. Jones’s masterful narrative is enhanced by numerous photographs and feature boxes—on the Bastille or Josephine Baker, for instance—that complete a colorful and comprehensive portrait of a place that has endured Vikings, Black Death, and the Nazis to emerge as the heart of a resurgent Europe. This is a thrilling companion for history buffs and backpack, or armchair, travelers alike.

'For a few moments they sat there in silence fraught with the unexpressed. Their bodies were taut and alert, listening for the slightest message from the other, the minutest shift in energy from the other. Deprived of the will to move they sat next to each other in unquiet silence. The unspoken swirled around them in dizzy circles.' Set in Paris, Budapest and Hyderabad, this is a story about Sadhavi, a married woman, who finds herself intensely attracted to Kanav, a scholar and teacher, whom she meets in Paris. An intelligent woman with a traditional upbringing, a modern liberal education, married into an orthodox Brahmin family, Sadhavi had not actively thought about or pursued that which would fulfill her as an individual- till she comes to Paris and, away from her familiar surroundings, finds herself somewhat alone, emotionally vulnerable and intangibly connected to Kanav. Sadhavi's yearning for an elusive fulfillment-and her struggle to let go of it-forms the core of the narrative, shaping the finely nuanced, contemplative contours of this quietly told but deeply felt novel.