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Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: The Other Paris

Simon Russell Beale

Luc Sante

Pete Nichols

Karen Rose

Book of the Week: The Other Paris: Episode 5

The Other Paris

Episode 5

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, The Other Paris, Episode 5

Frehel, Damia, Piaf - only one name is needed for the chanteuses of Paris.

By Luc Sante. Frehel, Damia, Piaf - only one name is needed for the chanteuses of Paris. Read by Simon Russell Beale.

Paris, City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow - the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the wilfully nonconforming.

In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that alternative metropolis, which has all but vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself and, by extension, throughout the world.

He draws on testimony from a great range of witnesses - from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and flaneurs - whose research is matched only by the vividness of Sante's narration.

"Paris, a city so beautiful that people would rather be poor there than rich somewhere else." Guy Debord.
"This brilliant, beautifully written essay is the finest I've ever read about Paris. Ever. " Paul Auster.

Luc Sante was born in Verviers Belgium and emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. Since 1984, he has been a teacher and writer, and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. His publications include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, The Factory of Facts and Folk Photography. He currently teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College in New York State.


Writer: Luc Sante
Abridger: Pete Nichols
Reader: Simon Russell Beale

Producer: Karen Rose
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.

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Luc Sante's journey through the dark side of Paris that was, read by Simon Russell Beale

Luc Sante's journey through the dark side of the Paris that was, read by Simon Russell Beale. Abridged by Pete Nichols

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