Paris in literature
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Shari Benstock Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Follows the lives and creativity of two dozen American, British and French women who moved to Paris and dared to be different.

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Paris and London during the 1789 Revolution and before. The plot's pure Hollywood, but the streets and at least some of the social backdrop are for real.

Robert Ferguson Henry Miller (o/p). Very readable biography of the old rogue and his rumbustious doings, including his long stint in Paris and affair with Anaïs Nin.

Noel Riley Fitch Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A history of literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. Founder of the original Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, Beach was the lightning rod of literary Paris. The work also follows her relationship with her companion, Adrienne Monnier, the documentation of which helps to place homosexuality in a larger historical context.

Brion Gysin The Last Museum (o/p). The setting is the Hôtel Bardo, the Beat hotel: the co-residents are Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Published posthumously, this is 1960s Paris in its most manic mode.

* Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's memoirs of his life as a young man in Paris in the 1920s. Includes fascinating accounts of meetings with literary celebrities Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc.

Jack Kerouac Satori in Paris . . . and in Brittany, too. Uniquely inconsequential Kerouac experiences.

Ian Littlewood Paris: A Literary Companion (o/p). A thorough account of which literary figures went where, and what they had to say about it.

Herbert Lottman Colette: A Life. An interesting if somewhat dry account of this enigmatic Parisian writer's life.

Barry Miles The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958–1963. Follows the self-indulgent exploits of the residents of The Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur on the Left Bank.

Christopher Miller Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. An exploration of the intermingling issues of nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism in Paris's ever-evolving literary landscape. Interesting topic if somewhat overly academic prose.

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer; Quiet Days in Clichy. Again 1930s Paris, though from a more focused angle – sex, essentially. Erratic, wild, self-obsessed writing, but with definite flights of genius.

* Anaïs Nin Delta of Venus. Written in the early 1940s for a dollar a page, these short stories make up what is probably the most inventive, literate and sexy porno-graphy ever written.

* George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London. Documen-tary account of breadline living in the 1930s – Orwell at his best.

Paul Rambali French Blues (o/p). Movies, sex, down-and-outs, politics, fast food, bikers – a cynical, streetwise look at modern urban France.

Jean Rhys Quartet. A beautiful and evocative story of a lonely young woman's existence on the fringes of 1920s Montparnasse society.

French (in translation)

Paul Auster (ed) The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry. Bilingual anthology containing the major French poets of the twentieth century, most of whom were based in Paris: includes Apollinaire, Cendrars, Aragon, Éluard and Prévert.

* Honoré de Balzac Le Père Goriot. Biting exposé of cruelty and selfishness in the contrasting worlds of the fashionable faubourg St-Germain and a down-at-heel but genteel boarding house in the Quartier Latin. Like Dickens, but with a harder heart. Balzac's equally brilliant Wild Asses Skin is a strange moralistic tale of an ambitious young man's fall from grace in early nineteenth-century Paris.

Baudelaire's Paris translated by Laurence Kitchen. Gloom and doom by Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Verlaine and Jiménez – in bilingual edition.

Calixthe Beyala The Little Prince of Belleville, translated by Marjolijn De Jager. The tale of 7-year-old Loukoum and his efforts to reconcile the hypocrisies and hard truths about his family and his adopted city. The harsh realities facing Paris's African immigrant communities are recounted with honest clarity.

* André Breton Nadja. First published in 1928, Nadja is widely considered the most important and influential novel to spring from the Surrealist movement. Largely autobiographical, it portrays the complex relationship between the narrator and a young woman in Paris.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Death on Credit. A landmark in twentieth-century French literature, along with his earlier Voyage to the End of the Night, Céline recounts the delirium of the world as seen through the eyes of an adolescent in working-class Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Blaise Cendrars To the End of the World. An outrageous bawdy tale of a randy septuagenarian Parisian actress, having an affair with a deserter from the Foreign Legion.

Colette Chéri. Considered Colette's finest novel, Chéri brilliantly evokes the world of a demi-monde Parisian courtesan who has a doomed love affair with a man at least half her age.

Didier Daeninckx Murder in Memoriam. A thriller involving two murders: one of a Frenchman during the massacre of the Algerians in Paris in 1961, the other of his son twenty years later. The investigation by an honest detective lays bare dirty tricks, corruption, racism and the cover-up of the massacre.

Agnès Desarthe Good Intentions. Shortlisted in Britain for the Jewish Quarterly prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2002, Desarthe's unsettling novella describes with black humour a young woman's attempts to deal with difficult neighbours in a Belleville apartment block. The book came out in France around the same time as the feel-good film Amélie and couldn't be a better antidote.

Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo. One hell of a good yarn, with Paris and Marseilles locations.

* Gustave Flaubert Sentimental Education. A lively, detailed 1869 reconstruction of the life, manners, characters and politics of Parisians in the 1840s, including the 1848 Revolution.

* Victor Hugo Les Misérables. A racy, eminently readable novel by the French equivalent of Dickens, about the Parisian poor and low-life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Book Four contains an account of the barricade fighting during the 1832 insurrection.

François Maspero Le Sourire du Chat (translated as Cat's Grin). Semi-autobiographical novel of the young teenager Luc in Paris during World War II, with his adored elder brother in the Resistance, his parents taken to concentration camps as Paris is liberated, and everyone else busily collaborating. An intensely moving and revealing account of the war period.

* Guy de Maupassant Bel-Ami. Maupassant's chef-d'oeuvre reveals the double standards of Paris during the Belle Époque with a keen observer's eye.

Daniel Pennac The Scapegoat and The Fairy Gunmother. Finally two of the series of four have been translated into English. Pennac has long been Paris's favourite contemporary writer, with his hilarious crime stories set among the chaos and colour of multi-ethnic Belleville.

Georges Pérec Life: A User's Manual. An extraordinary literary jigsaw puzzle of life, past and present, human, animal and mineral, extracted from the residents of an imaginary apartment block in the 17^e arrondissement of Paris.

Édith Piaf My Life. Piaf's dramatic story told pretty much in her words.

* Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past. Proust's 3000-page novel, much of it set in Paris, is one of the twentieth century's greatest works of fiction. Its fascination with memory, love and loss, and its stylistic innovation have had a huge influence on the modern novel.

Jacques Réda The Ruins of Paris. Impressionistic, meditative wanderings around the city written by a Parisian poet in the late 1970s. Either brilliantly avant-garde or deeply pretentious, depending on how well you can stomach Réda's self-conscious prose.

Jean-Paul Sartre Roads to Freedom Trilogy. Metaphysics and gloom, despite the title.

* Georges Simenon Maigret at the Crossroads, or any other of the Maigret novels. Literary crime thrillers; the Montmartre and seedy criminal locations are unbeatable. Those who don't like crime fiction should go for The Little Saint, the story of a little boy growing up in the rue Mouffetard when it was a down-at-heel market street.

Michel Tournier The Golden Droplet. A magical tale of a Saharan boy coming to Paris, where strange adventures, against the backdrop of immigrant life in the slums, overtake him because he never drops his desert oasis view of the world.

* Émile Zola Nana. The rise and fall of a courtesan in the decadent times of the Second Empire. Not bad on sex, but confused on sexual politics. A great story nevertheless, which brings mid-nineteenth-century Paris alive, direct, to present-day senses. Paris is also the setting for Zola's L'Assommoir, L'Argent and Thérèse Raquin.