Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road

Demystifying the French, in the U.S. and in France

March 5, 2019 at 1:07 pm 2 comments

So my new book, Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, is now available in France, hooray!

Penelope Fletcher at The Red Wheelbarrow has my book!

If you’re in Paris you can buy it at the wonderful indie bookstore The Red Wheelbarrow, in a lovely location right across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens. (How perfect is that? Go to a lovely little bookstore, buy some great books from friendly, sympathetic, super-intelligent Penelope Fletcher, then go across the street to find a chair and read in one of the best places to read in the world!)

If you’re in Washington D.C. you can buy it at my favorite bookstore in the U.S., Politics and Prose (they also ship books!)

And if you’re not able to get to a bookstore, you can buy it online, either from my publisher BookBaby, or from other sources online.

The book has been out now for almost six weeks, and it’s getting some great press. I’ll be teaching my Parlez-Vous Anglais? Survival French and French Travel Tips class this Saturday at Politics and Prose, and the following Saturday, a mini Writing from the Heart workshop.

While I was here, I met with a group I’m very fond of that I call “my Frenchies.” This is a conversation group I started at Politics and Prose about seven years ago, and it’s still going strong (though no longer at the store). They honored me with my first official book event at one of their meetings. I read from my book in English (of course!) and then we discussed it in French. Here they are!

What everyone over here wants to know is: What do the French think about your book?! And now that it is available in France, I’m eager to learn the answer to that question. I hope “the French” will like it, and will recognize my deep love and admiration for this country and its people, despite the fact that I have poked fun at a couple of little things about them in the course of describing our cultural differences (I poked plenty of good-natured fun at Americans too!) None of us are perfect…right?

Anyway. I’ll soon be back in Essoyes. And though it has been very good to be here, I’m looking forward to being back home again too.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor, writing coach, and teacher of writing and of literature who divides her time between the U.S. and France. She leads writing workshops in Essoyes, a village in the Champagne region, and teaches “Paris: A Literary Adventure” for the City University of New York each summer. This summer she will be leading a writing seminar in Paris in partnership with Politics and Prose bookstore. She is currently working on a literary memoir, A Long Way from Iowa.

Entry filed under: Demystifying the French. Tags: bookstores Paris, demystifying the French, French life, French travel tips, French ways, Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.