In her third literary Baedeker, Alice Leccese Powers–editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind – lets us explore France through the senses and sensibilities of thirty-three British and American authors.

From Gertrude Stein’s Paris to Ezra Pound’s Pyrenees; from Tobias Smollett, who grumbled, to Peter Mayle, who settled in; and from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad to David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day –here is France in all its splendor in the words of some of the best and most entertaining writers in the English language. Here are the food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France described by intrepid travelers who also happen to be brilliant essayists, poets, and novelists.

Henry Adams • James Baldwin • Elizabeth Bishop • Mary Blume • James Fenimore Cooper • Charles Dickens • Lawrence Durrell • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • M. F. K. Fisher • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Janet Flanner • Adam Gopnik • Joanne Harris • Ernest Hemingway • Washington Irving • Henry James • Thomas Jefferson • Stanley Karnow • Peter Mayle • Mary McCarthy • Jan Morris • Ezra Pound • David Sedaris • Tobias Smollett • Gertrude Stein • Robert Louis Stevenson • Paul Theroux • Gillian Tindall • Calvin Trillin • Mark Twain • Edith Wharton • Richard Wilbur • William Carlos Williams