A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

provincial-at-paris.jpg

Location

“I had to read Honoré de Balzac’s A Distinguished Provincial at Paris for a grad school lit class. I was expecting it to be boring or inaccessible because a lot of my other favorite books this year, and in general—Emma Donoghue's Room (Little, Brown, 2010); Melinda Moustakis' Bear Down, Bear North (University of Georgia Press, 2011); and Tayari Jone's Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books, 2011)—don't use elevated language and are narrated in the first person by characters who have strange voices and skewed perspectives.

read more