The Paris Bookseller

November 15, 2021
A fictional portrait of Sylvia Beach and her iconic Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, from its founding in 1919 through 1936. When, after a stint in the Red Cross, adventurous American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company, first on 8 rue Dupuytren and later at its famous address, 12 rue de L'Od�on, it soon becomes a haven for Paris' cadre of expatriate writers. Selling and renting English language books, the store is an ideal counterpart to La Maison des Amis des Livres, the French bookshop across the street, run by Sylvia's friend and soon-to-be lover, Adrienne Monnier. Thanks to Sylvia's fluency in French, and to Adrienne, the French and English literary worlds converge in the ambit of the two shops, known as "Odeonia." Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot (and somewhat less eagerly, Gertrude Stein) are only a few of the notables that frequent Shakespeare and Company. As readers become inured to the heady atmosphere of cafe society and intellectual ferment on the Left Bank, the book's midsection sags. Apart from a poignant crisis concerning Sylvia's mother, the bookseller's professional involvement with James Joyce poses the main, if not the only, conflict in Maher's book. As Joyce strives to complete the groundbreaking Ulysses, Sylvia's store is his refuge. Of all the passing writers, Joyce is the most meticulously portrayed: his egg-shaped head, his ashplant cane, his dog phobia, his failing vision (due to glaucoma). Sylvia helps Joyce sort out his domestic chaos and pays for his treatment by her own eye doctor. When excerpts from Ulysses appear in a New York magazine whose editors are then prosecuted for disseminating smut, other publishers run scared. Into this pusillanimous void steps Sylvia. But after gargantuan struggles to publish Ulysses under her own aegis, will Sylvia reap the rewards of her literary valor, or at least of her loyalty to Joyce? That is the question that propels this plot. A fine tribute to a tireless and selfless champion of literary genius.

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November 22, 2021
Maher (The Girl in White Gloves) offers an alluring look at the history of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore. American writer Sylvia Beach is living in Paris in 1917 when she becomes enamored with bookseller Adrienne Monnier. Sylvia’s passion for books outweighs her passion for writing, and with money provided by her mother, she opens her own shop. As Adrienne and Sylvia embark on a romance, they become immersed in the literary world of Paris, spending time with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. After Joyce’s novel Ulysses is banned in the U.S., Sylvia takes on the task of publishing it. The printing costs strain her finances, and Joyce keeps revising the work, but as the tide turns a decade later, it proves a sound investment. Maher’s portrayal of Sylvia ably capitalizes on the historical figure’s singular life, highlighting how the bookseller and publisher embraced the progressive literature of the time and established a loving partnership with Adrienne that would not have been accepted in the U.S. This succeeds at carrying the flame for the lost generation. Agent: Kevan Lyon, Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.

Starred review from December 15, 2021
Anyone fascinated by Paris in the 1920s and Hemingway's Lost Generation will be familiar with Shakespeare and Company and by extension, its founder, Sylvia Beach. Maher (The Girl in White Gloves, 2020) allows Beach to tell her own story, not only of founding the famous bookstore and lending library but also of publishing the original edition of James Joyce's controversial novel Ulysses, which was initially banned in the U.S. for obscenity and spurred various legal battles. While Beach's store and social life were filled with such luminaries as Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound, Maher's novel puts the spotlight on Beach and her partner in business and in life, Adrienne Monnier, owner of a French-language bookstore that inspired and then became a close counterpart of Shakespeare and Company. Writing in the third person from Sylvia's point of view, Maher draws on letters and a memoir to imagine Beach's internal struggles as she shepherded Ulysses into print and her tumultuous relationship with Joyce, who required a great deal of financial, emotional, and practical assistance during the writing and publishing process and the long legal fight the novel provoked. Recommend to fans of Paula McLean's The Paris Wife (2011) and anyone who enjoyed Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

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