The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France

By Ina Caro

Caro takes us on an unforgettable driving tour of France, from Provence to the Loire Valley to Paris. With Caro as an epicurean, knowledgeable, and delightfully opinionated guide, we can always be sure to find the most breathtaking vistas, the most extraordinary châteaux, the most inspiring cathedrals, and the very best meals.

A Taste for Provence

By Helen Horowitz

In A Taste for Provence, historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz digs into this question and spins a wonderfully appealing tale of how Provence became Provence. The region had previously been regarded as a backwater and known only for its Roman ruins, but in the postwar era authors, chefs, food writers, visual artists, purveyors of goods, and travel magazines crafted a new, alluring image for Provence. Soon, the travel industry learned that there were many ways to roam—and some even involved sitting still. The promise of longer stays where one cooked fresh food from storied outdoor markets became desirable as American travelers sought new tastes and unadulterated ingredients.

Even as she revels in its atmospheric, cultural, and culinary attractions, Horowitz demystifies Provence and the perpetuation of its image today. Guiding readers through books, magazines, and cookbooks, she takes us on a tour of Provence pitched as a new Eden, and she dives into the records of a wide range of visual media—paintings, photographs, television, and film—demonstrating what fueled American enthusiasm for the region. Beginning in the 1970s, Provence—for a summer, a month, or even just a week or two—became a dream for many Americans. Even today as a road well traveled, Provence continues to enchant travelers, armchair and actual alike.

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France

By Kermit Lynch

Kermit Lynch's recounting of his experiences on the wine route and in the wine cellars of France takes the reader through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, Northern and Southern Rhone, and the Cote d'Or.

Burgundy: Art. Architecture. Landscape

By Rolf Toman

La Bourgogne (Burgundy) - the name evokes beautiful landscapes and cities, famous wines and culinary pleasures. In this book, the reader will discover all cathedrals and cloisters, castles and vineyards of this region. Burgundy is a guide through 3,000 years of Burgundy’s history, beginning at the Neolithic era with mysterious meter-thick layers of horse bones, through Greek craftwork and Etruscan gold, then further on to the Cistercian cloisters and up to the present day. Burgundy is exciting!

Food Wine Burgundy

By David Downie

For decades, David Downie and Alison Harris have been exploring Burgundy—they walked clear across it in 2006—reporting on their finds for top magazines and newspapers worldwide. This is the third Terroir Guide they have collaborated on and perhaps the most detailed and personal of any so far. Burgundy is one of France’s great food and wine regions. Many of the world’s most sought-after wines are produced there; so, too, are some of the most underrated, underpriced white wines in France. Each of Burgundy’s five wine districts is thoroughly explored in this guide, with recommendations on which wines to buy and which wineries to visit. Wine terminology is explained in a way that anyone can understand. On the food side, Burgundy still has a surprising number of luxurious restaurants, as well as dozens of country auberges visitors dream of discovering. Downie leads you to just such places, as well as to specialty food shops where you can taste the region’s terroir firsthand. Burgundy’s lush scenery distills the essence of French terroir, and each of its subregions has a distinctive character where the architecture and art reflect this storied diversity.

French Wine: A History

By Roderick Phillips

For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines.
 
French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts.

Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals.

In a French Kitchen: Tales and Traditions of Everyday Home Cooking in France

By Susan Herrmann Loomis

A delightful celebration of French life and the cooks who turn even the simplest meals into a celebration.

One by one, readers are invited to meet the busy people of Louviers and surrounding villages and towns of Loomis's adopted home, from runway-chic Edith, who has zero passion for cooking - but a love of food that inspires her to whip up an array of mouthwatering dishes - to Nathalie, who becomes misty-eyed as she talks about her mother's Breton cooking, then goes on to reproduce it. Through friends and neighbours like these, Loomis learns that delicious, even decadent meals don't have to be complicated.

Are French cooks better organized when planning and shopping? Do they have a greater ability to improvise with whatever they have on hand when unexpected guests arrive? The answer to both is: Yes. But they also have an innate understanding of food and cooking, are instinctively knowledgeable about seasonal produce, and understand what combination of simple ingredients will bring out the best of their gardens or local markets.

Thankfully for everyone In a French Kitchen shares the everyday French tips, secrets and recipes that allow them to turn every meal into a sumptious occasion.

In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art

By Sue Roe

When the young Pablo Picasso first arrived in Paris in 1900, the most progressive young artists all lived and worked in the seedy hillside quarter of Montmartre, in the shade of the old windmills. Over the next decade, among the studios, salons, cafés, dance halls, and galleries of Montmartre, the young Spaniard joined the likes of Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Gertrude Stein, and many more in revolutionizing artistic expression.
 
Blending exceptional scholarship with graceful prose, Sue Roe paints a remarkable group portrait of the men and women who profoundly changed the arts of painting, sculpture, dance, music, literature, and fashion. She describes the origins of such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism, and reconstructs the stories behind immortal paintings by Picasso and Matisse. She shows how daily life in Montmartre—which brought artists together with acrobats and dancers, prostitutes and clowns—provided an essential cauldron for artistic experimentation and for the colorful relationships, friendships, loyalties, and feuds that gave rise to some of the most pathbreaking and lasting works of the twentieth century.
 
In Montmartre is a thrilling account of an extraordinary group of artists on the cusp of fame and immortality that brings vividly to life one of the key moments in the history of modern art.

The Finest Wines of Bordeaux: A Regional Guide to the Best Châteaux and Their Wines

By James Lawther

Bordeaux has long symbolized the peak of prestige for French wine. Yet, despite its outstanding reputation, the region has remained relatively closed to consumers, as forbidding as the highest château gates or the most tannic of its young wines. In this highly approachable, beautifully illustrated guide, Master of Wine James Lawther draws on his insider’s knowledge to open up Bordeaux. He has identified 90 producers from both the Left and Right banks with the finest wines and the most interesting stories to tell and takes us inside their chateaux, offering intimate portraits of both the properties and the people who shape this fascinating region. He also provides chapters on history and winemaking that explain how Bordeaux has risen over the past three centuries to the unparalleled status it enjoys today. Illustrated throughout with original photographs and detailed color maps, The Finest Wines of Bordeaux reveals a changing region that is more open to new producers than its insular reputation suggests—and one that continues to hold a tight grip on the imaginations of wine enthusiasts around the world. 

The Food of France

By Waverley Root

Embraces not only the marvels of French cooking but French history, language, landscape, and customs as well. Here is France for the traveler, the chef, and the connoisseur of fine prose. Maps and b & w line drawings throughout.

Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution

By William Echikson

For wine lovers the world over, Bordeaux is the center of the universe. But in the past two decades, revolutionaries have stormed its traditional bastions, making their mark—and their fortunes—modernizing the production and marketing of wine. Noble Rot introduces us to the figures who epitomize the changes sweeping Bordeaux—the noble family behind Château d'Yquem; a stonemason turned winemaker whose wine, made in a garage, sells for $100 a bottle; the Maryland-based critic Robert Parker, whose opinion routinely makes or breaks a wine; the New World operations that have used branding to undercut Bordeaux's supremacy—and delves into the mysteries of the legendary classification of 1855.

A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal

Les Misérables

By Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Inspector Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.

Madame Bovary

By Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

The Glass-Blowers

By Daphne du Maurier

The world of the glass-blowers has its own traditions, it's own language - and its own rules. 'If you marry into glass' Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, 'you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world'. But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution, against which the family struggles to survive.

Years later, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on her own family's tale of tradition and sorrow, Daphne du Maurier weaves an unforgettable saga of beauty, war, and family.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

By Emmuska Orczy

Armed with only his wits and his cunning, one man recklessly defies the French revolutionaries and rescues scores of innocent men, women, and children from the deadly guillotine. His friends and foes know him only as the Scarlet Pimpernel. But the ruthless French agent Chauvelin is sworn to discover his identity and to hunt him down.

The Three Musketeers

By Alexandre Dumas

Young D’Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the king’s elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to – Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends - the Three Musketeers. But D'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the path of Cardinal Richelieu's deadly machinations, and when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies with only the Musketeers to depend on. A stirring tale of friendship and adventure, The Three Musketeers continues to be one of the most influential and popular pieces of French literature.

In this acclaimed new translation, Richard Pevear’s introduction investigates the controversy of Dumas’ literary collaborators, and how important serialisation was to the book’s success. This edition also includes notes on the text.

The Cockleshell Heroes

José Ferrer

A crack squad of British Royal Marines embarks upon a mission of sabotage, against all odds. Filmed in Bordeaux and various locations in France.

The Consul of Bordeaux

Francisco Manso and João Correa

The story of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who saved the lives of 30,000 refugees in World War II by disobeying orders. Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Português Audience Award winner for Best Film. Filmed in Bordeaux, France.

Goya in Bordeaux

Carlos Saura

Explore the final months in the life of one of the most important artists of the modern era, Francisco Goya. Five-time Goya Award winner and recipient of the European Film Award for European Cinematographer. Filmed in Bordeaux, France.

You Will Be My Son

Gilles Legrand

The story of a domineering father, owner of a prestigious vineyard in Saint-Émilion, and the unrealistic expectations he has for his son and his legacy. Originally titled Tu Sera Mon Fil. Filmed in Saint-Émilion, France.