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Impossible City

Paris in the Twenty-First Century

Impossible City Open the full-size image

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Contributors

By Simon Kuper

Read by Tim Frances

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Jun 4, 2024
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781668642405

Price

$24.99

Format

  1. ebook
  2. Hardcover

Format:

  1. Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
  2. ebook $18.99 $24.99 CAD
  3. Hardcover $30.00 $39.00 CAD

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An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society – at least a little.

When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn’t planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other
plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city’s notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.

This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it’s a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn’t. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the “Grand Paris” project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs.

This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian clichés.

Genre:

  • Nonfiction
  • History
  • Europe
  • France

Simon Kuper is a British-French author and journalist for the Financial Times. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, and he has written for the Observer, The Times and the Guardian, and also writes regularly for Dutch newspapers. He moved to Paris in 2001 and lives there with his French-American wife Pamela Druckerman and their daughters. 
 

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Simon Kuper

About the Author

Simon Kuper is a leading soccer writer. The winner of the William Hill Prize for sports book of the year in Britain, Kuper writes a weekly column for the Financial Times. He lives in Paris, France. 
 
Stefan Szymanski is a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan and a leading sports economist. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

Learn more about this author

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