by Bill Bryson
A week after the Charlie Hebdo massacre that decimated this city’s false sense of serenity and ethnic coexistence, Jake Lamar has organized a brothers’ outing. The acclaimed African American writer and Francophile Ta-Nehisi Coates is giving a talk about “The Case for Reparations,” his highly influential Atlantic magazine cover story, at the American Library. Richard Allen, the sharp expat with the camera, and I arrive late after a drink at a nearby café. We pull up chairs in the back and find Coates in midlecture to a full, predominantly white house. In the Q&A, an elderly white man asks if in Paris Coates has encountered any racism. Coates hesitates before conceding that, yes, in fact a white woman once approached him shouting, “Quelle horreur, un nègre!” before throwing a dirty napkin at him. No one in the audience, least of all the man who posed the question, seems to know what to say to that, and Coates helpfully chalks up the encounter to this particular lady’s evident madness and not to the workings of the entire French society.
(Later over email, I ask him whether he sees himself as part of the black tradition here. He tells me that although he has consciously sought to avoid being lumped with other black writers in Paris, “I’m not really sure why I even feel that way. I love Baldwin. ADORE Baldwin . . . [but] it feels claustrophobic, like there’s no room for you to be yourself . . . All of that said, it does strike me as too much to write off the black expatriate experience here as a mere coincidence.”)
As Richard and I gather with the other brothers and their wives who are now preparing to leave, Jake invites Coates to have a drink with us, but he politely rain checks. We make our way out of the library and into the damp Rue du Général Camou, eventually crossing back to the Right Bank via the Pont de l’Alma, the Eiffel Tower glowing orange over our heads, the Seine flowing fast beneath our feet. The city feels strangely back to normal, except for the occasional presence of submachine gun–wielding cops and military personnel, and black-and-white JE SUIS CHARLIE placards affixed to the windows of all the cafés. Our group is made up of Jake and Dorli; Joel Dreyfuss and his wife, Veronica, a striking cocoa-complexioned woman with blue eyes, from St. Louis; Randy Garrett, the raconteur-bricoleur; the filmmaker Zach Miller; Richard Allen; and a dapper English professor from Columbia named Bob O’Meally. We slide into a large table at a café on the Avenue George V and order a round of drinks. I immediately grasp what makes Randy so much fun when in no time he’s bought Dorli and Veronica loose roses from the Bangladeshi man peddling flowers table to table.
Everyone seems in very good spirits, and I feel for a moment as if I am actually in another era. Our drinks arrive. We toast, and I ask Richard if in fact there is still really such a thing as black Paris. “It’s off and on,” he shrugs, taking a sip of wine. “It all depends on who is here and when.” Right now, Bob O’Meally is here, and the table feels fuller for it. He has organized an exhibition of Romare Bearden’s paintings and collages at Reid Hall, Columbia University’s outpost near Montparnasse. I tell him I’m excited to see it, and maybe because these older men remind me so much of him, my thoughts turn back around to my father.
One of the great enigmas of my childhood was that when he did finally get his chance to come here in the early ’90s, after a fortnight of beating the pavement and seeing all that he could, my father returned home as though nothing at all had happened. I waited and waited for him to fill me with stories about this magical city but was met only with silence. In fact, I don’t think he ever spoke euphorically about Paris again. I have always suspected it had something to do with the reason that, in the scariest movies, the audience should never be allowed to look directly at the monster. In either circumstance, the reality, however great, can only dissolve before the richness of our own imagination—and before the lore we carry inside us.
Contributors’ Notes
Michael Chabon is the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps and Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, and the middle-grade book Summerland. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
Sara Corbett is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and coauthor of A House in the Sky.
Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country, and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible.
Gretel Ehrlich is the author of 15 books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—including The Solace of Open Spaces, Heart Mountain, This Cold Heaven, and Facing the Wave, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her books have won many awards, including the first Henry David Thoreau Prize for nature writing, the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Geographic Expeditions Council grants for travel in the Arctic, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Orion, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best Essays of the Century, among many other publications. Her poetry was featured on the PBS NewsHour. She lives with her partner, Neal Conan, on a farm in the highlands of Hawaii and on a ranch in Wyoming.
William Finnegan is the author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life; Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country; A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique; Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters; and Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. He has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. He lives in New York.
Alice Gregory is a contributing editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and a columnist for The New York Times Book Review. She lives in New York and has contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and n+1.
Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and ten works of nonfiction, covering between them subjects as varied as globalism, the Cuban Revolution, Islamic mysticism, and the 14th Dalai Lama. His most recent books are The Art of Stillness (on the virtue of not traveling) and The Man Within My Head (on the inner and outer inquiries of Graham Greene). Though based in rural Japan since 1992, he currently serves as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange, California, and continues to write frequently for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Granta, and many others.
Andrew W. Jones is the author of Two Seasons in the Bubble: Living and Coaching Basketball in Bulgaria. In 2014 he won the Norman Mailer Middle and High School Teachers Creative Nonfiction Award for his essay “The Inca Champions League.” He currently lives, teaches, and writes in Brasília, Brazil.
Kea Krause has written for The Believer, The Toast, Vice, Narratively, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught creative writing. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now resides in Queens, New York.
Helen Macdonald is an English writer, a naturalist, and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is the author of the best-selling H Is for Hawk, which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collection Shaler’s Fish.
Patricia Marx is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Liv
e and Rugrats. Her most recent book is Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties. She teaches at Columbia University and Stony Brook University. She was the first woman elected to The Harvard Lampoon and in 2015 received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her children’s book Now Everybody Really Hates Me was the first and only winner of the Friedrich Medal, an award made up by Patty and named after her air conditioner. She can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.
D. T. Max is a graduate of Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. As a young man he learned Italian during visits to an uncle in Rome who was a writer for Cinecittà. He is the author of the best-selling Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, the story of an Italian family with a mysterious insomnia. He is at work on a book about Mark Twain.
Freda Moon is a widely published journalist and the “Frugal Family” columnist for the New York Times, where she is a regular contributor to the travel section. She lives with her husband, infant daughter, and rescue dog on a vintage trawler motor yacht in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mitch Moxley has written for GQ, The Atlantic, Grantland, Playboy, The Atavist Magazine, and other publications, and he is an editor at Roads & Kingdoms, an online journal of foreign correspondence. He is the author of Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China, about the six years he lived in Beijing.
Justin Nobel writes about science and the environment for magazines and literary journals, and is presently at work on a book of tales about the weather. A book he cowrote with an exonerated death row inmate will be published in November 2016. He lives in New Orleans.
Stephanie Pearson is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. After earning her master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she served on Outside’s editorial staff for 12 years and has since logged many hours in the field, reporting stories in wild corners of the world, from Bhutan to Colombia to the Falkland Islands. This is her second story anthologized in the Best American Travel Writing series.
Raised in Australia and a denizen of the East Village of Manhattan, Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer at Smithsonian magazine and a regular at the New York Times, WSJ Magazine, and other publications. He is the author of five books combining arcane history and travel, most recently Napoleon’s Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped and The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe. He is a regular on the History Channel, where he has spoken about everything from the Crusades to the birth of disco. This is his seventh appearance in the Best American Travel Writing series.
Steven Rinella is the author of five books and hosts The MeatEater Podcast and MeatEater television series. He lives in Seattle.
David Rowell is the author of The Train of Small Mercies, a novel. His second book, on how and why we make the music we do, will be published in 2018.
Patrick Symmes is the author of two books on the Cuban Revolution and its leaders, Chasing Che and The Boys from Dolores.
Jeffrey Tayler lives in Moscow. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic who has also written for National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Condé Nast Traveler, The American Scholar, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He is the author of seven books, including Facing the Congo, River of No Reprieve, and Topless Jihadis: Inside Femen, the World’s Most Provocative Activist Group. “Fyodor’s Guide” is the sixth work of his chosen for the Best American Travel Writing series.
Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and Cape Cod. His most recent book is Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads.
William T. Vollmann has written nine novels, three collections of stories, six works of nonfiction, and a memoir. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and the Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of the 2010 memoir Losing My Cool. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Le Monde, New Republic, The Atlantic, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, the London Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Smithsonian Journeys, The American Scholar, and many other places. He currently lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at Purple and Holiday magazines and a regular book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His next book, a reckoning with how we define race in America, is forthcoming.
Notable Travel Writing of 2015
SELECTED BY JASON WILSON
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Among Strangers. Guernica, December 15.
Elif Batuman
The Big Dig. The New Yorker, August 31.
Don Belt
Wild Heart of Sweden. National Geographic, October.
Bernd Brunner
Istanbul Panorama. Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter.
Brin-Jonathan Butler
Myths Made Flesh: Last Breaths in a Spanish Bullring. SB Nation, August 19.
Pablo Calvi
Secret Reserves. The Believer, Fall.
Julia Cooke
Art in the Time of Politics. Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall.
Dave Eggers
Understand the Sky. AFAR, June/July.
Aaron Gilbreath
Three Feet by Six Feet by Three Feet. The Morning News, January 27.
Will Grant
A Liar Standing Next to a Hole in the Ground. Outside, March.
Karl Taro Greenfeld
The Island of No Regrets. Roads & Kingdoms, November 10.
Peter Hessler
Travels with My Censor. The New Yorker, March 9.
Leslie Jamison
The Two Faces of Paradise. AFAR, March/April.
Mark Jenkins
Point of No Return. National Geographic, September.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
My Saga (Part 1 and Part 2). The New York Times Magazine, March 1 and March 15.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Teach Yourself Italian. The New Yorker, December 7.
Mitch Moxley
Superman of Havana. Roads & Kingdoms, December 16.
Justin Nobel
Walking the Tornado Line. Oxford American, Spring.
Norman Ollestad
Vertical Snap. Outside, May.
Lawrence Osborne
The Eagles Have Landed. Departures, March/April.
Tony Perrottet
Traveler in the Sunset Clouds. Smithsonian, April.
Edward Readicker-Henderson
Dream Weavers. AFAR, October.
Elizabeth Rush
The Saree Express. Witness, Spring.
Nat Segnit
Blast from the Past. Harper’s Magazine, December.
Kate Siber
Ghost of a Chance. Preservation, Spring.
Choire Sicha
Summer Fridays. The New York Times Magazine, July 19.
Thomas Swick
A Press Trip to Branson. Roads & Kingdoms, May 20.
Patrick Symmes
Following in the Inca’s Giant Steps. Smithsonian, July.
Tom Vanderbilt
Loudsourcing. Outside, April.
Lisa Wells
All Across the Desert Our Bread Is Blooming! The Believer, January/February.
Emily Witt
The Body Politic. Harper’s Magazine, January.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editors
BILL BRYSON, guest editor, is the best-selling author of A Walk in the Woods; A Short History of Nearly Everything; One Summer: America, 1927; The Road to Little Dribbling; and numerous other books.
JASON WILSON, series editor, is the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits;
Spaghetti on the Wall; and the forthcoming Why Wine Matters. He has written for the Washington Post Magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other publications, and has won awards for Best Food Column from the Association of Food Journalists four times.