Paris, When It’s Naked

Etel Adnan tells a story of our time, a time when simply to sit and think is to be baffled bu a thousand shifting currents of social and political (and therefore personal) possibilities. Beneath the daily round of the individual, and the habituations of Paris as a locale, move forces (market, military, demographic) that threaten to subvert and destroy, promise to challenge and enlighten. This conflict is made naked here, thanks to Adnan’s wonderful ability to level with herself and her readers. The light of the personal becomes all the brighter, among such giant shadows.

— David Bromige

Paris, When It’s Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarmé and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elán vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indispensable book by an indispensable writer. 

— Morgan Gibson