Jean-Paul Sartre

Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante Lily Tuck Harper: 272 pp., $25.95 IF ELSA MORANTE and her husband, Alberto Moravia, had been French rather than Italian, "they would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,"...

"Beijing Encounter," Lonely Planet, $11.99; ISBN: 978-1-74104-666-3 Lonely Planet's Encounter series consists of compact pocket guides for city visitors on a tight sightseeing schedule. Each is designed to enable the traveler to "discover twice the...

Is it deep denial or just shallow ignorance that accounts for otherwise intelligent Americans overlooking the founding history that shames this republic each Fourth of July? One such citizen suggested calling off this year's parades, fireworks, and...

Young people are constantly being warned that the information they include in their Facebook profiles could eventually come back to haunt them. Photographs of bacchanalian escapades, catastrophic sartorial decisions or intimate moments with toothless,...

Here's a line from the Gloucester County media release about Thursday night's York District town hall meeting: 'There will also be an opportunity to share comments, concerns, or questions about county-related issues.' So much for that. At about 7:45 p.m....

Nicolas Berggruen became a billionaire through classic value investing. Now, he is switching to a new strategy. Call it "values investing." With rice farms in Cambodia, windmill farms in Turkey, an ethanol plant in Oregon and glittering new skyscrapers...

What Was Lost A Novel Catherine O'Flynn Henry Holt: 256 pp., $14 paper I don't know of any art form that has been declared dead more often than the realist novel. Even the term "realist novel" is a kind of pejorative -- don't we want something more...

The Dead All Have the Same Skin A Novel Boris Vian, translated from the French by Paul Knobloch TamTam Books: 120 pp., $18 paper Imagine an intellectual, astutely French, who hangs out with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, has a child's sense of humor...

April 28, 2008 In 2000, Billy Mernit wrote the textbook "Writing the Romantic Comedy"; eight years later, his debut novel, "Imagine Me and You," attempts to both honor and subvert the genre he's obviously familiar with. But sometimes a writer should be...

PARIS—My first encounter with the self-service rental bikes in Paris was like my first day in college French class: I was in over my head. It was 8 a.m. one Sunday last November, an hour when no one is out in Paris except street cleaners, cafe...

Someone once noted that a sure sign of the passing of a cultural phenomenon is not its disappearance but its preservation, or sanctification, in a museum. And so it is now with smoking in France. After I moved to Paris three years ago from Manhattan,...

The reams of news stories on the new French ban on smoking in cafes, restaurants and night spots have invariably focused on the aura of glamour those little death sticks once conveyed. In newspapers around the globe, nostalgic descriptions of the likes of...