Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Rosecrans Baldwin
Picador Paperback
On Sale: June 25, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), or to schedule an interview with Rosecrans Baldwin, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

PRAISE FOR PARIS, I LOVE YOU
“Baldwin’s book is deftly written, with a wry style and liberally deployed irony. And it’s very funny.”—The Atlantic

“A picture of what it’s like to live and work—like, work work—in a city understood by most Americans only through tourist goggles. It’s this balance of the city’s dirty deceptions…with the timeless elegance of every boulevard and back-alley bistro that makes the book feel so necessary and welcome.”—GQ

“The most French book by an American author you’ll ever read…Baldwin’s writings on Paris are saturated with a bittersweet nostalgia for the present, living in a place he loves that he is fated to leave.”—The Daily Beast

“Baldwin and his wife, Rachel—as well as the Parisians he came to know—are funny and idiosyncratic, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with them….A love story about the city and its people.”—NPR

“A charming, hilarious account of la vie Parisienne as experienced by an observant young American…his vivid impressions of Paris and its people (expats included) are most engaging. Great fun and surprisingly touching. Great fun and surprisingly touching.”—Kirkus (starred review)

ABOUT PARIS, I LOVE YOU
Rosecrans Baldwin had always dreamed of living in Paris, ever since vacationing there when he was nine. So he couldn’t refuse an offer to work at a Parisian ad agency—even though he had no experience in advertising and hardly spoke French.

But the Paris that Rosecrans and his wife, Rachel, arrived in wasn’t the romantic city he remembered, and over the next eighteen months, his dogged American optimism was put to the test: at work (where he wrote booklets on breastfeeding), at home (in the hub of a massive construction project), and at every confusing dinner party in between. A hilarious and refreshingly honest take on life in one of the world’s most beloved cities, PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN is a book about a young man whose preconceptions are usurped by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy metropolis—which is just what he needs to fall in love with Paris a second time.

ABOUT ROSECRANS BALDWIN
ROSECRANS BALDWIN is the author of the novel You Lost Me There, an NPR Best Book of 2010 and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He is a cofounder of the online magazine The Morning News. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
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Follow Rosecrans on Tumblr
Read an excerpt of PARIS, I LOVE YOU at GQ
Listen to Rosecrans on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

How Should a Person Be?
Sheila Heti
Picador Paperback
Publication Date: June 25, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), or to schedule an interview with Sheila Heti, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

PRAISE FOR HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
“A vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western city.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…unlike any novel I can think of.”
—David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review

“Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the bravest, strangest, most original novels I’ve read this year.”
—The Boston Globe

ABOUT HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
By turns loved and reviled upon its U.S. publication, Sheila Heti’s “breakthrough novel” (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman’s heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?

ABOUT SHEILA HETI
Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction, including The Middle Stories and Ticknor; and an essay collection written with Misha Glouberman, The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Her writing has been translated into ten languages and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, n+1, The Guardian, and other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
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Visit Sheila Heti’s website
Listen to an interview with Sheila on KCRW’s Bookworm
Read an interview with Sheila at The Rumpus
Read an interview with Sheila at Bomb Magazine

Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir by Rosamond Bernier

Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir
Rosamond Bernier
On sale: November 27, 2012 (December)
Essays / Memoir / Art

For a review copy (US and Canada only) or to schedule an interview with Rosamond Bernier, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR SOME OF MY LIVES
“Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir, animated by Bernier’s inimitable voice and charm, includes encounters with countless luminaries from the worlds of art and style.…Her razor-sharp insights, playful humor, and deep humility throw the colorful personalities surrounding her into high relief.”—Vogue

“[Bernier’s] charm, wit, and style are apparent….She doesn’t just give names; she provides the details that reveal someone’s personality….She turned being social into a kind of art.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Bernier proves an able guide across a wide range of forms, from painting and sculpture to architecture and fashion. Her interview with Coco Chanel is brilliant….She has provided a very stylish memoir indeed.”
—The Plain Dealer

“These are scrumptious essays, not only because they chronicle extraordinary adventures of artistic and historical significance but also because they are so wise, archly offhand, and alight with a passion for living and learning.”—Booklist (starred review)

“An inimitable life captured with spirited, winning immediacy.”—Kirkus

ABOUT SOME OF MY LIVES
Rosamond Bernier has known many (one is tempted to say all) of the greatest artists and composers of the twentieth century. In SOME OF MY LIVES (Picador / On Sale: November 27, 2012), she has made a kind of literary scrapbook from an extraordinary array of writings, ranging from scholarly articles for American publications to her many contributions to the art journal L’OEIL, which she cofounded in 1955.

Through the stories of her encounters with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, Max Ernst, Aaron Copeland, Malcolm Lowry, and Karl Lagerfeld, we come to understand the sheer richness of Bernier’s experiences and memories. Pithy, hilarious, and wise, SOME OF MY LIVES is a multifaceted self-portrait of a life informed and surrounded by the arts.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosamond Bernier was born in Philadelphia and was educated in France, England, and America. In 1955, she cofounded the influential art magazine L’OEIL, which featured the works of the masters of the School of Paris. A renowned lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rosamond Bernier was named for life to the International Best-Dressed List.

MORE INFORMATION
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Read an excerpt

Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman

Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
André Aciman
On Sale: November 27, 2012 (December)
Picador
Essays / Travel / Culture

For a review copy (US and Canada only) or to schedule an interview with André Aciman, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR ALIBIS
“A beautiful new book of essays…Aciman’s deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight.”—Teju Cole, The New York Times Book Review

“The journey is always beguiling and its conclusion often poignant….Aciman is a brilliant chronicler of ‘the disconnect, the hiatus, the tiny synapse’ between who we are and who—or where—we wish we might have been.”—The Wall Street Journal

“André Aciman is, quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years—you’d have to go back much farther…to find the combination of elegance, restraint, and longing that Aciman so generously bestows upon his readers.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

ABOUT ALIBIS
André Aciman first rose to prominence with Out of Egypt—a finely wrought memoir of his childhood in Alexandria—and in the fifteen years since, his reputation has only grown. He has been lauded as an editor, essayist, and critic, and as a scholar of French literature and the director of the Writers Institute at the City University of New York. More recently, Aciman has also earned widespread praise as a novelist. When his debut novel, Call Me by Your Name was published in 2007, New York magazine declared him “the most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century,” raving that “few novels since Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are this adept at capturing the nuances of human emotion.” And writing last year in The New York Review of Books, Michael Dirda called Aciman’s second novel, Eight White Nights, “a bravura re-creation of all the feints and counterfeints, yearnings and frustrations, of modern courtship.”

In ALIBIS (Picador Paperback / On sale: November 27, 2012), André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memories evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities such as Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to life secrets unearthed from an ordinary street corner, ALIBIS reminds us that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
André Aciman is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

MORE INFORMATION
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André Aciman on writing (New York Times Opinionator)

Privacy by Garret Keizer

Privacy [BIG IDEAS//small books]
Garret Keizer
On sale: August 7, 2012
A Picador Paperback Original
Politics / Current Events / Culture

PRAISE FOR PRIVACY
“Acclaimed essayist and Harper’s contributor Keizer conducts a philosophical meditation on the nature of privacy and finds that the ‘right to be let alone’ is a lot more complex than many may think…. With unyielding analytical scrutiny, Keizer raises plenty of doubt about the primacy of so-called private lives…. The consequences of such revelations are vast, and readers will be left considering the implications long after the last page is turned. A provocative and unsettling look at something most take for granted—but shouldn’t.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Keizer ably describes the disturbing and ever-diminishing expectations of privacy…and makes a cogent analysis of the threats to privacy that accompany smartphones and other digital devices. Keizer’s commentary reaches deeply into the fabric of post 9/11 America and finds a landscape that has compromised the fundamental human need for privacy, and argues passionately for the value of privacy in a democratic society”
—Publishers Weekly

“[A] thoughtful examination of the concept of privacy… Though debates over privacy tend to be driven by technological developments—Facebook and the like—Keizer reminds us that our personal and cultural “privacy settings” or lack of them have political, environmental, and even spiritual valences that are ignored at the expense of democracy and social justice…. Keizer’s cautionary wisdom is informed by a deeply felt humanism and presented with eloquence and wit.”
— Brendan Driscoll, Booklist

PRAISE FOR GARRET KEIZER
“Very few writers combine thoughtfulness and rage as satisfyingly as Garret Keizer.”
—Naomi Klein

ABOUT PRIVACY
American essayist and Harper’s contributing editor Garret Keizer offers a brilliant, literate look at our strip-searched, over-shared, viral-videoed existence.

Body scans at the airport, candid pics on Facebook, a Twitter account for your stray thoughts, and a surveillance camera on every street corner — today we have an audience for all of the extraordinary and banal events of our lives. The threshold between privacy and exposure becomes more permeable by the minute. But what happens to our private selves when we cannot escape scrutiny, and to our public personas when they pass from our control?

In this wide-ranging, penetrating addition to the Big Ideas//Small Books series, and in his own unmistakable voice, Garret Keizer considers the moral dimensions of privacy in relation to issues of social justice, economic inequality, and the increasing commoditization of the global marketplace. Though acutely aware of the digital threat to privacy rights, Keizer refuses to see privacy in purely technological terms or as an essentially legalistic value. Instead, he locates privacy in the human capacity for resistance and in the sustainable society “with liberty and justice for all.”

ABOUT GARRET KEIZER
Garret Keizer is the author of six books, mostly recently of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, a contributing writer to Mother Jones, and a recent Guggenheim Fellow.

MORE INFORMATION
Privacy on the Picador website
Cover image for download
Author photo for download
Author’s website
Garret Keizer on The Colbert Report (2010) [opens with sound]
Garret Keizer discusses his previous book about noise on To the Best of Our Knowledge
Garret Keizer on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate discussing his previous book 

For a review copy, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com