Roger Grenier

Brassaï (1899-1984) was a key member of a group of European and North American photographers who, over the course of the 20th century, managed to redefine the identity and enrich the potential of photography as an artistic medium. The main theme of his work was Paris, the subject matter for some of his most significant and renowned images. He captured vibrant images of the daily life of the city, especially the vitality of its night-time atmosphere, in a vivid expression of the powerful artistic dimension of his perspective. The evocative capacity of his images achieved unquestionable recognition that spread from artistic photography circles to the tourist industry and the commercial photography circuit.

Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners.

A melancholy novel on the lives of a group of men and women in 1940s France who went to school together. From youth, hope, war--one collaborates, the other resists--to jobs, class, marriage, affairs, divorce and the disappointments of old age. By the author of Years in Ambush.

With Palace of Books, the author invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people feel the need to write, or what is involved in putting one's self on the page, or how a writer knows she's written her last sentence, Grenier marshals apposite passages from his favorite writers: Chekhov, Baudelaire, Proust, James, Kafka, Mansfield and many others. Those writers mingle companionably with tales from Grenier's half-century as an editor and friend to countless legendary figures, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, and Brassai.