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  • Published: 15 May 2007
  • ISBN: 9781590171844
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 296
  • RRP: $32.99

Memoirs of Montparnasse





Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco’s memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.

  • Published: 15 May 2007
  • ISBN: 9781590171844
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 296
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

John Glassco

John Glassco (1909 - 1981) was born in Montreal and attended McGill, but moved to Paris before attaining his degree. Glassco won the Governor General’s Award in 1971 for his Selected Poems.

Praise for Memoirs of Montparnasse

  • "This is a delightful, on-the-spot report of the days when it was still possible to be very young, very hip and very happy all at the same time...this precious, witty document from a long-vanished younger generation has both the freshness and remoteness of some ornate space ship found intact in a forgotten tomb."--The New York Times
  • "The title calls to mind a whole genre of books...But Glassco's book, published from a manuscript nearly forty years old, is fresher and truer to the moment than the others, as well as being more novelistic and, in a sense, legendary."--The New Republic
  • "A very good book, perhaps a great book."--The Washington Star
  • "The best book of prose by a Canadian that I've ever read."--Montreal Gazette
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