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Article: Adam Gopnik, editor Americans in Paris: a Literary Anthology.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- September 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Adam Gopnik, editor Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. The Library of America, 656 pages, $40
Perhaps the only trope more tired than the American in Paris is the American writer in Paris. For years, Adam Gopnik, the last expatriate left standing at La Closerie des Lilas, beat his dead horse in the pages of The New Yorker. He collected his writings in a book called Paris to the Moon. Now there is Americans in Paris, a repackaging of American writers from Ben Franklin to Dorothea Tanning, edited by vous-know-who. Here, great writers become a succession of epithets from Let's Go, Paris! Abigail Adams is an "ur-WASP." Thomas Jefferson: "photogenic" and "the ...