There is a Paris that most tourists never see, and those who actually enter, may never escape. It is a city of uprooted peasants and Brazilian transvestites, of Arab assassins, and Tanzanian concierges. It is, in short, the Paris that Lawrence Osborne navigates with sure-footed brilliance in this burnished and subversive guide. The stops in Paris Dreambook include a voodoo temple on the Boulevard de Clichy, the steam-wreathed inner sanctum of a Turkish bath, the great erotic diorama of the Rue St. Denis, an apartment belonging to the ancient veteran of an S & M brothel that once served the blonde conquerors of the German occupation. Each of them has a history that is a microcosm of the city, a future, that hints at the cities on approaching transformation, into the worlds most swollen Disneyland. Sinister, titillating corrosively funny. This is Travel Writer at its most soaringly imaginative. By

ISBN: 9780679737759