We'll Never Have Paris

"When good Americans die, they go to Paris," wrote the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in 1894.

The French capital has always radiated an unmatched cultural, political, and intellectual brilliance in the anglophone imagination, maintaining its status as the modern cosmopolitan city par excellence through the twentieth century to today.

We'll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with the myth of a bohemian and literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett, and Shakespeare and Company) which is largely an anglophone construct—one that the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years.

Edited by Andrew Gallix, this collection brings together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. They explore this theme through short stories, essays, and poetry, building a captivating portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today—a Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century.

We'll Never Have Paris includes contributions from seventy-nine authors, including Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Max Porter, Sophie Mackintosh, and Lauren Elkin.

This book offers fiction and essays inspired by Paris from more than 70 Anglophone writers—a Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century.