Launch of The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan: Text and the City: Paris and London with Eric Hazan and Iain Sinclair

On Wednesday 3rd March at 7.30, join us for the launch of Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris

at the Institut français, the French Cultural Institute in the UK, 17 Queensberry Place, SW7 2DT

Radical author and publisher Eric Hazan will be in conversation with Iain Sinclair about the relation between literature and development of spaces, focussing on their journeys through Paris and London.

Eric Hazan will discuss his newly translated urban history of Paris, The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps.

In The Invention of Paris, Eric Hazan takes the reader on an exciting and historically rich tour through the construction of Paris, exploring the places and struggles that have marked its growth. Concentrating both on the literary and cultural representations of the city, as well as riots, rebellions and revolutions — throughout the nineteenth century and up until 1968—Hazan acts as a guide who is simultaneously personal and rigorous in tone.

Introducing us to characters as varied as Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Manet and Proust, Hazan charts the formation of a “Red Paris” through the sedimentation of acts and sources of insurgency, and gives us an unparalleled history of the barricade in the life of the city. The Invention of Paris opens a window on a Paris too often hidden beneath tourist kitsch and bourgeois.

Iain Sinclair is the acclaimed author of many books. In London Orbital Sinclair walked the length of the M5 motorway circling London on foot.  His latest work, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire pieces together the oral accounts and occult psychogeography of East London.

For further information, click here.

Tickets are £5, £3 concessions . Book online / 020 7073 1350.