The Paris Stories — Laird Hunt

Fiction. Available again for the first time in a decade, Laird Hunt's stories, mock parables and false histories posit a Paris pushed none-too-gently through its own gilt-framed looking glass, turning both ends of the telescope on the old men, barbers, ventriloquists, orange sellers, battling lovers, ghosts and highly lucid dreamers doing their best to inhabit it. Imagine a series of scenes, shot by Agnes Varda and Francois Truffaut, in which Gertrude Stein, Michel de Montaigne and Max Ernst skip, stroll, swim and streak their way through the late 20th century streets and waterways of the French capital. Alternately elegiac, tender, humorous and dark, THE PARIS STORIES will serve as a fresh introduction (or reintroduction) to the work of a writer whom Paul Auster has called "strange, original and utterly brilliant."