Customer Reviews

The Letters of Sylvia Beach

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SO GRATEFUL TO HAVE THESE LETTERS OF THE WONDERFUL SYLVIA BEACH, A PERSON SO IMPORTANT IN THE PARIS LITERARY WORLD OF THE 20'S AND 30'S.

Letters sent from Paris and other points by Sylvia Beach to her many friends, over many years. It helps that many of these friends became giants of literature, such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway.

While Ms. Beach was a good writer, these letters tend to be of a more family, friendship, or book-business nature. Not much talk of current politics or general social trends. For example, no discussion of her time while interned in France during World War II. However any one interested in the literary life and personalities--especially Joyce--of Paris in the first half of the last century would profit from this book.

Keri Walsh has done a superior editing job with this collection of letters. Her occasional comments on the text are clear, unobtrusive, and helpful.

(I especially enjoyed this book because it came to me as a gift from my youngest son, whose own birthday happens to fall on Bloomsday. He bought it in Paris at Shakespeare and Company, the successor bookstore named in homage to Sylvia Beach's original.)

These precious letters from Sylvia Beach to some of the world's most important literary figures of the last century are essential reading for anyone whose interest lies in the expat, modernist movement in 20th Century Paris. Such a wonderful peek into the past though Sylvia's own voice. HIghly recommended.