Author

Marcia DeSanctis

came to Chicago

on January 22

Photo credit: Ron Haviv

Marcia is the author of  100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go.

She explained the background of her book – her many trips to France, her marriage in Paris and the time she lived in that country.
Her book is unique, it is not your usual tourist book, the perspective is very different. Convinced that “women travel differently”, she highlights how she, “as a woman, interacts with the places” presented. She focuses on places where she had a personal story to tell.

We feel at ease in Paris. We feel we belong to France…
The country forces us to slow down.

Then the author spoke about her methodology: how did she choose these 100 places? She used 5 main criteria:

1. a place connected to a woman
2. a very beautiful place
3. a place with which she had a strong personal affinity
4. a French iconic place
5. or a place connected with other women she interviewed during her research trips

Marcia highlighted a few of these places with beautiful slides, allowing her to speak about some important women in the world of French culture or history:

1. Camille Claudel and her sculptures – don’t forget we happen to have a live tour until 1/28 on Rodin’s Lover, by Heather Web, a historical novel on Camille precisely!
2. Marie Curie’s office
3. Marcia’s literary muses: Edith Wharton’s book A Motor-Flight Through France
4. and Colette, a great naturalist – have you read her essay Paris From My Window, written during WWII?
5. Léa Feldblum and La Maison d’Izieu, which housed Jewish refugee children
6. George Sand
7. Louse Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842), portraitist of the royal family
8. Josephine
9. Josephine Baker
10. Eléonore d’Aquitaine
11. Catherine De Medici
12. Joan of Arc

A lively Q&A followed. For an accurate representation of Paris in older days, Marcia recommended movies with Audrey Hepburn, and also Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola.

100 Places in France
Every Woman Should Go

(travel essays)

 Release date: October 21, 2014
at Travelers’ Tales

380 pages

ISBN: 978-1609520823

Marcia DeSanctis is a former television news producer for Barbara Walters, NBC and CBS News.
She has written essays and articles for numerous publications including Vogue, Marie Claire, Town & Country, O the Oprah Magazine, Departures, and The New York Times Magazine.
Her essays have been widely anthologized and she is the recipient of three Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism,
as well as a Solas Award for best travel writing.
She holds a degree from Princeton University in Slavic Languages and Literature and a Masters in Foreign Policy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Visit her website. Follow her on Facebook, and Twitter 

Buy the book: Amazon, on Travelers’ Tales

 CLICK ON THE BANNER BELOW TO READ REVIEWS
AND AN EXCERPT OF THE BOOK

Today is the official

release day of

The City of Blood

[police procedural / thriller]

(translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

 Release date: January 20, 2015
at Le French Book

212 pages

ISBN: 978-1939474186

Website | Goodreads

***

SYNOPSIS

When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. There, renowned artist Samuel Cassian is inaugurating the first archeological dig of modern art, twenty-seven years after burying the leftovers of a banquet. In front of reporters from around the world, excavators uncover a skeleton. Could it be the artist’s own son? And does that death have anything to do with the current string of nightclub murders by the “Paris Butcher”? On the site of the French capital’s former slaughterhouses, the investigation takes Nico and France’s top criminal investigation division from artists’ studios to autopsy theaters and nightclubs in hopes of tracking down the murderer who has turned this Paris park into a city of blood. [provided by the publisher]

***

Called, “the French Michael Connelly,” Frédérique Molay graduated from France’s prestigious Science Po
and began her career in politics and the French administration.
She worked as chief of staff for the deputy mayor of Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
and then was elected to the local government in Saône-et-Loire.
Meanwhile, she spent her nights pursing a passion for writing she had nourished since she wrote her first novel at the age of eleven.
The first in the Paris Homicide series, The 7th Woman,
won France’s most prestigious crime fiction award and went on to become an international bestseller,
allowing Molay to dedicate her life to writing and raising her three children.

 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Read more about it here