Ten top books that celebrate Paris

Kate Clayborn is the USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance novels. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Bookpage, and more.

She is a lifelong reader of texts of all kinds, and a passionate advocate for the romance genre. A Midwesterner by birth, she now lives in Virginia.

Clayborn's latest novel is The Paris Match.

At People magazine the author tagged "ten favorite Paris-set texts ... all which taught me something about the textures of Parisian life." One title on the list:

How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City by Joan DeJean

Something that has always fascinated me about Paris is our collective psychic relationship to it — the way it’s so easy to call its landmarks to mind, the way we associate it with certain clothing, the way we picture sidewalk cafés with La Vie en Rose playing softly from… somewhere. But Paris is an old, old city, with such a complicated history that is completely divorced from a lot of what we picture when we think of the it today. DeJean’s book starts all the way back in the 1500s, describing a time when Paris was pretty desolate. The story of how imagination and innovation made it into what it is now is truly compelling, but so too is the reminder of Paris’s deep complexity. It’s a city that should never be over-simplified or simply romanticized, and that’s a good reminder for a writer who takes it on as a setting.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: How Paris Became Paris.

--Marshal Zeringue