In the summer of '53, an expatriated trio of young Americans founded the international literary quarterly, The Paris Review. Guided by George Plimpton, we roam the streets and cafés of Paris, glimpse the expatriate literati world of the 50s and 60s, and step into the bustling New York offices of the Review, meeting people, past and present, who remain central to this singular literary endeavor.
In the summer of '53, an expatriated trio of young Americans founded the international literary quarterly, The Paris Review. Guided by George Plimpton, we roam the streets and cafés of Paris, glimpse the expatriate literati world of the 50s and 60s, and step into the bustling New York offices of the Review, meeting people, past and present, who remain central to this singular literary endeavor.
While traveling in Paris, author Henry Miller and his wife, June, meet Anais Nin, and sexual sparks fly as Nin starts an affair with the openly bisexual June. When June is forced to return to the U.S., she gives Nin her blessing to sleep with her husband. Then, when June returns to France, an unexpected, and sometimes contentious, threesome forms.
Mathias Gold is a down-on-his-luck New Yorker who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. But when he arrives in France to sell the vast domicile, he's shocked to discover a live-in tenant who is not prepared to budge. His apartment is a viager—an ancient French real estate system with complex rules pertaining to its resale—and the feisty Englishwoman Mathilde Girard, who has lived in the apartment with her daughter Chloé for many years, can by contract collect monthly payments from Mathias until her death.
While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
A young woman from the Midwest gets more than she bargained for when she moves to New York to become a writer and ends up as the assistant to the tyrannical, larger-than-life editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine.
During the 1960s, two American jazz musicians living in Paris meet and fall in love with two American tourist girls and must decide between music and love.
When Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay with them, what begins as a casual friendship ripens into a sensual voyage of discovery and desire in which nothing is off limits and everything is possible.
Famed architect Jeremy Angust is approached on his trip to the Paris Airport by a chatty girl named Texel Textor who needs a ride. He obliges and after they part ways at the airport entrance, he misses his flight. As he settles in the lounge, he encounters the mysterious young Texel again, who insists on telling her strange story — and the conversation grows stranger and more twisted until it turns sinister and deadly.
Paris, 1964. The Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, one of the most accomplished and respected artists of his generation, asks his friend, the American writer James Lord, to sit for a portrait, assuring him that it will take no longer than two or three hours, an afternoon at the most.
Nine years later, Jesse travels across Europe giving readings from a book he wrote about the night he spent in Vienna with Celine. After his reading in Paris, Celine finds him, and they spend part of the day together before Jesse has to again leave for a flight. They are both in relationships now, and Jesse has a son, but as their strong feelings for each other start to return, both confess a longing for more.
Two old friends meet for dinner; as one tells anecdotes detailing his experiences, the other notices their differing worldviews.