Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses," Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters.

This collection reveals Beach's charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in "The Dial"; her battle to curb the piracy of "Ulysses" in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Od?on the heart of modernist Paris.

Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses," Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters.

This collection reveals Beach's charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in "The Dial"; her battle to curb the piracy of "Ulysses" in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Od?on the heart of modernist Paris.

Acclaimed author Noel Riley Fitch, abetted by noted artist Rick Tulka, serves the dish on Select, the famous Montparnasse cafe that for nearly nine decades has been so vital to Paris and its intellectual denizens: from Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton to the writers and artists who continue to work quietly there in the back room or heatedly debate every topic imaginable into the night. The artists have their work on the walls; the novelists include the cafe setting in their fiction. The quiet and drama of the Select world illustrates the centrality of cafes particularly this one to Parisian social, cultural, and intellectual life. Blending pithy profiles and witty drawings of clientele and staff, the book is organized around a history of the cafe, its daily and seasonal rhythms, particular colorful patrons, and even its typical cafe/brasserie food (including a few recipes)."

Anais Nin was the ultimate femme fatale, a passionate and mysterious woman, world famous for her extravagant sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bicoastal bigamous marriages. In the mid-1920s, eager to break the confines of American Victorianism both as an artist and as a woman, Nin traveled to Paris, where she fell in with the legendary artistic and literary circles of the Left Bank.

"Nin's Diary", published over the years in numerous volumes, has been hailed as a breakthrough document by literary critics and feminists alike. Yet in the published diary, Nin did not lay bare her true self. She instead constructed a carefully stylized image of the woman the world knew as "Anais" while keeping her inner self hidden. In "Anais", biographer Noel Riley Fitch presents an honest portrait of Nin's passionate, tumultuous, and sometimes bitterly painful life. Fitch reveals, among other things, that behind Nin's coquetry was the desperate yearning of an abused and abandoned child. This, the first biography of Nin, complements, corrects, and demystifies the image that Nin so artfully crafted in her diary.

A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties

"Courageous, hardworking, self-sacrificing, determined, witty, and charming, Sylvia Beach built her famous Shakespeare and Company Bookshop into a veritable hub of international literature, published Joyce's Ulysses, [and] served as cheerful den-mother to hundreds of writers, artists, and composers. . . . Professor Fitch's richly detailed biography, the product of ten years' research, projects Miss Beach's busy life against the moving background of literary Paris in the golden age between the wars, and stands as an admirable and wonderfully readable achievement in historical biography." —Carlos Baker

"An absorbing book, backed by an impressive amount of research. Working from the rich collection of Sylvia Beach's papers, Noel Fitch has written an objective story that corrects many of the errors and misjudgments to be found in other literary memoirs of those eventful years in Paris." —Malcolm Cowley

"Fitch fills out many gaps in the Joyce story and offers us a new view of Joyce, the genius, the injustice collector, and the most incredible literary leech of all time. Sylvia Beach emerges as one of the most remarkable women of the twenties." —Leon Edel

"Noel Riley Fitch has written a perfect book, full to the brim with literary history, correct and whole-hearted both in statement and in implication. She makes me feel and remember a good many things that happened before and after my time. I'm glad to have lived long enough to read it." —Glenway Wescott