{"title":"VERSO","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"balzacs-paris-the-city-as-human-comedy","title":"Balzac's Paris","description":"Exploring Paris arm in arm with Balzac, nineteenth-century France’s most famous novelist and observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail – the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks – and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBalzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ Eric Hazan follows in Balzac’s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist’s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac’s photographic memory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore than a tour of the city, Balzac’s Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975574773917,"sku":null,"price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781839767258.jpg?v=1746653117"},{"product_id":"a-philosophy-of-walking","title":"A Philosophy of Walking","description":"This philosophical ode to finding joy in simple things explores how walking has influenced history’s greatest thinkers—from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Gandhi and Nietzsche.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” —Nietzsche\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this French bestseller, leading thinker and philosopher Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975577985181,"sku":null,"price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781804290446.jpg?v=1746653116"},{"product_id":"the-lamentations-of-zeno-a-novel","title":"The Lamentations of Zeno","description":"A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eZeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age—perhaps of our entire history as a species—from an impassioned human angle.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975595614365,"sku":null,"price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781784782191.jpg?v=1746653114"},{"product_id":"paris-in-turmoil-a-city-between-past-and-future","title":"Paris in Turmoil","description":"A kaleidoscopic look at Paris’s ever-changing forms and people\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Since the disastrous Pompidou years, working-class Paris has been steadily nibbled away, either by destruction or more insidiously by a kind of internal colonization.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTake for example a small outlying district populated by Arabs, blacks and poor whites twenty years ago, the L’Olive neighbourhood north of La Chapelle The area is noted as pleasant, people frequent it and explore it, and as the rents are low some settle there. Others follow, first friends and then anyone else. Rents go up, buildings are renovated, bars open, then an organic food shop, a vegan restaurant... The earlier indigenous inhabitants are driven out by the rising rents and settle further away, in Saint-Denis if they are lucky, or else in Garges-lès-Gonesse, Goussainville or God knows where.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"But new neighbourhoods are emerging, for example the Chinese quarter of Bas Belleville, which has grown since the 1970s to the point that in some streets, such as Rue Civiale or Rue Rampal, the restaurants and shops are all Chinese, with many Chinese sex workers on Boulevard de la Villette. These Chinese almost all come from Wenzhou, a large province south of Shanghai, whose inhabitants are reputedly known for their commercial skills.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eParis is constantly changing as a living organism, both for better and for worse. This book is an incitement to open our eyes and lend an ear to the tumult of this incomparable capital, from the Périphérique to Place Vendôme, its markets of Aligre and Belleville, its cafés and tabacs, its history from Balzac to Sartre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn some thirty succinct vignettes, from bookshops to beggars, Art Nouveau to street sounds, Parisian writers to urban warts, Jacobins to Surrealism, Hazan offers a host of invaluable aperçus, illuminated by a matchless knowledge of his native city.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975628513437,"sku":null,"price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781839764660.jpg?v=1746653113"},{"product_id":"i-rigoberta-menchu","title":"I, Rigoberta Menchú","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Nobel Peace Prize winner reflects on poverty, injustice, and the struggles of Mayan communities in Guatemala, offering “a fascinating and moving description of the culture of an entire people” (\u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe learned Spanish and turned to catechistic work as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment. Menchú vividly conveys the traditional beliefs of her community and her personal response to feminist and socialist ideas. Above all, these pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47655522631837,"sku":null,"price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/rigobertamenchu.jpg?v=1771111671"}],"url":"https:\/\/postcardbookshop.com\/collections\/verso.oembed","provider":"Postcard Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}