Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down
When Baldwin lands a job with a French advertising agency, he and his wife trade Brooklyn for Paris and 18 months of opportunities seized, the idea being that his nine-to-five will support their otherwise writerly lives in the European capital. Maybe not naively, but idealistically, they aren’t anticipating some of the hurdles: an irrevocably bureaucratic infrastructure that turns most transactions into piles of paper and weeks of waiting, or an apartment surrounded on six sides by neighbors’ construction work. Baldwin works on his first novel (You Lost Me There, 2010) before and after work at the agency—a superlative fishbowl of characters who are so well remembered that one wonders when the author decided to write a memoir of the experience, in fact—until he’s satisfied, and the novel is picked up by a U.S. publisher. Baldwin proves that with the right attitude, everything in this perhaps most magically remembered of all cities is either beautiful, hilarious, or both, and his friendly voice and approachable style will grab those who want to be there and those who have never been. --Annie Bostrom