There were scattered boos at the mention of Mr. Macron, and Ms. Smith isn’t having it. With her South Jersey accent gloriously intact, she lets loose.
“You should have Trump as your president,” she tells the pack of Parisians. “Then you’d know what it’s like to wake up every day with a president who doesn’t give a” — and here Ms. Smith uses one of several vulgarities — “about living things, about trees, about animals, about the air we breathe or the water we drink. We have to give our leaders a chance who are trying to do something because our president in America does nothing.”
If you want to read properly, go to a shopping mall — but don’t spend a nickel.
Here, among the pretzel purveyors and sports-fan shops (one kiosk at the mall I frequent used to sell team-branded spatulas), parked in one of the islands of chairs and couches tucked near the anchor stores, I’ve found something like the Platonic ideal of a reading environment. Plentiful light, comfortable seating, the assurance that you won’t be bothered by either the pressing demands of home or interrupting humans. (Trust me, nobody will strike up a conversation with you about books at the mall. Even if you sit near the Barnes & Noble.)
A certain notion of French femininity took hold in the early two-thousands. In “French Women Don’t Get Fat” (2004), Mireille Guiliano recounted with disconcerting precision her gain of thirty pounds more than forty years earlier, and divulged the “old French tricks”—namely, the recipe for a soup of leeks and water—that helped her to stay thin forever while never having to admit that she was trying to. The French woman, for all her confidence, was a codependent. The self-improvement industry’s all-purpose foil, she represented a rigorous alternative to whatever her scuzzy American sisters were feeling bad about: their weight, their clothes, their sex lives, their parenting. She was closely aligned with fashion, which is to say the luxury business. Guiliano, a former executive at the parent company of Veuve Clicquot champagne, offered up chicken braised in champagne as the perfect dish to make “on a workday when pressed for time.” In a series of style guides, the model Inès de la Fressange counselled readers to save up for investment pieces, while getting hers free from Chanel.
A man’s death and a masterpiece’s birth are the conjoined subjects of Steven Price’s brooding, beautiful book “Lampedusa.” It imagines the thoughts and emotions of Giuseppe Tomasi, the “last Prince of Lampedusa,” as he writes “The Leopard,” his majestic novel about political and social upheaval in Sicily during the Risorgimento. Price, a poet and the author of two previous works of fiction, emulates the lucid, courtly cadences of Tomasi’s prose and hews closely to the known biographical facts, but he makes this material his own. “Lampedusa” illuminates the complex connections between life and art, winding through Tomasi’s memories to reveal that his loving, profoundly sad depiction of 19th-century Sicily was rooted in 20th-century experiences of war, dislocation and loss.