The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino- 2015- A Paris in July 2024 Work - Memoir

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino- 2015-

Combining Parisian history, a detailed account an off the tourist track street with her memoirs as a New Yorker settling into Paris, Elaine Sciolino

has given us a delightful work.

On this street, the patron saint of France was beheaded and the Jesuits took their first vows. It was here that Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted circus acrobats, Emile Zola situated a lesbian dinner club in his novel Nana, and François Truffaut filmed scenes from The 400 Blows. Sciolino reveals the charms and idiosyncrasies of this street and its longtime residents—the Tunisian greengrocer, the husband-and-wife cheesemongers, the showman who’s been running a transvestite cabaret for more than half a century, the owner of a 100-year-old bookstore, the woman who repairs eighteenth-century mercury barometers—bringing Paris alive in all of its unique majesty. 

I found The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino to be a charming work. I hope to include her The Seine: The River That Made Paris among my reads for this month.

"Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, based in France since 2002. 

Her latest book, The Seine: The River That Made Paris, published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2019, was named by Barnes & Noble as its nonfiction choice for October 2020. In a review in The New York Times, Edmund White, the National Book Award winner, called Sciolino “a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way.... [She] has laid one more beautiful and amusing wreath on the altar of the City of Light.” The Times Literary Supplement called The Seine a book of “touching storytelling” and “an engaging and informative exploration of the city.” David A. Bell, Professor of History at Princeton University, said, “Sciolino writes with the authority of a historian, the sleuthing skills of a journalist, and the voice of a storyteller eager to recount the tales of those who have been touched by the Seine.”  

Her previous book, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, published in 2015, was a New York Times best seller. The New York Times wrote that “she has Paris at her feet;” the Chicago Tribune called her “a storyteller at heart.” 

Sciolino was decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, in 2010 for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States. 

In 2019, Sciolino became a member of the Executive Committee of Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international advocacy organization promoting freedom of information and freedom of the press. In 2018, she received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of London." From the author’s website

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life