Monday, December 10, 2012

"A Farewell in Paris" now on Kobo


A Farewell in Paris is now up on Kobo for $2.99. This is a nice EPUB version that reads quite well on my iPhone5. The novel is also up on Kindle and Smashwords for $2.99. Smashwords has every ebook format known to man and woman.


It’s 1928 Paris and literary agent Bill Lawrence is successfully selling the work of Left Bank writers back to New York from his sumptuous apartment on Île Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine River. Kurt Eckhart, a Berlin correspondent, asks Bill’s help in publishing his war novel, a story about a doomed romance with a German nurse. A brave war...a failed peace...a story set during the Jazz Age in Paris of the 1920s...with plenty of Lost Generation panache.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Free signed Book by Author

Free signed copy of "A Farewell in Paris," my new historical novel set in the Jazz Age of 1920s Paris. I will send to the first 20 people who email me their name and mailing address a free signed paperback copy of my new novel. The catch? I hope you will post a review of the book after reading it (skimming it or putting coffee cups on it or whatever you do with books!).  Email me at myersbooks@gmail.com .

More information at Myersbooks.com. or see Amazon book page at A Farewell in Paris.

Or visit my Amazon author page:  Amazon author page for Paul A. Myers.



My new historical novel A Farewell in Paris is now for sale on Amazon for print at $10.99 a copy and Kindle at $2.99. The ebook is also available as of today at Smashwords at $2.99 and will be available at all the other etailers in the coming weeks (iPad, Kobo, BN, Sony, Diesel, etc).

A brave war…a failed peace…a story set in the Jazz Age in Paris of the 1920s with a look back to the war and the peace that came afterward. Two American veterans of the 1918 battle at Chateau Thierry meet in Paris in 1928. Kurt, now a Berlin correspondent, is writing the great American novel about the grinding end to the war, the desolation of the peace in Germany, and a doomed romance with a German nurse. Bill, a literary agent living on Ile St.-Louis in Paris, plans to publish the novel at the same time as Hemingway’s war novel debuts. Left Bank writer Kate edits the novel, quietly remembering her own long-lost love affair in the war. There is a star turn for true-life character Djuna Barnes and cameos with Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Margaret Anderson, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, and John Maynard Keynes.  

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Preview edition of my new historical novel

download a pdf preview edition at myersbooks.com





A brave war   ...   a failed peace

Two American veterans of the 1918 battle at Chateau Thierry meet in Paris in 1928. Kurt, now a Berlin correspondent, is writing the great American novel about the grinding end to the war, the desolation of the peace in Germany, and a doomed romance with a German nurse. Bill, a literary agent living on Ile St.-Louis in Paris, plans to publish the novel at the same time as Hemingway’s war novel debuts. Left Bank writer Kate edits the novel, quietly remembering her own long-lost love affair in the war. Cameos of Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Natalie Barney, John Maynard Keynes. 




Saturday, August 25, 2012

BOOK REVIEW 
The Paris Correspondent


The chase for truth—expensive—in a world of commodity journalism—cheap 

by Paul A. Myers

Alan Cowell has crafted a black humor classic about the epic world of war correspondents reporting the truth of hard facts annealed in the heat of modern war. The reporting of hard facts is done inside a larger media world of internet journalism defined by the economics of cheap megabytes floating on a sea of internet lies and celebrity pretension.

The story is about Joe Shelby, a legendary war correspondent from Vietnam on, finishing out his career as an internet rewrite guy in Paris, and his epic love for the fearless combat photographer Faria Duclos. Their story is defined by many shared dangers and many infidelities to a great love that was not a relationship but something else. The narrator is Shelby’s less colorful, more sane, editorial sidekick, who becomes part of the larger narrative as whatever truths that need telling get told as a career winds down and important things get said.

Halfway through the novel I read the fascinating account of the life and death of London Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin in February 2012 in Syria in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair. Colvin’s is the true story of Faria Duclos and Joe Shelby rolled into one talented, yet very broken, true character, a reporter caught in the “addiction to the poison elixir of battle.” Her last assignment in Syria was described by her cameraman, “Of all the trips we had done together, this one was complete insanity.” What is the motivation here? The article stresses Colvin’s deep commitment to reporting the truth.

That also turns out to be the central motivation ascribed to war correspondents in The Paris Correspondent, the central talisman of their nomadic existence. But what is the truth here? The war correspondents are not sending back well-articulated critiques of the wars they are covering. Other people, more comfortably perched, write the analyses, weigh it in the scales of “good” policy or “bad” policy. The war correspondents send back the jarring, blood-soaked facts of human conflict that upturn the bureaucratic narrative, the thought-out assumptions. Characteristic of Colvin was getting out to the world images of the death of a young Palestinian woman in Lebanon, ambushed by Shiite militia snipers, as she lay by a burned-out car, blood pouring out of her and “the handful of blood-soaked dirt she had clenched in her pain.”

Simply put, The Paris Correspondent is the backstory to the life of Marie Colvin. The one resonates with the other in an almost perfect harmony between art and reality.

But another terrible fact is brought home to us in both the real-life story of Marie Colvin and the novel: men like Bashir Assad massacre women and children, with premeditation and no remorse, because the ugliest dimensions of brutality are effective tools of intimidation; brutality works because it is so ugly.

This streaming of hard-gained, painful facts from the world’s war zones to the world public is something that can’t be outsourced to bloggers. Only so much can be conveyed by youtube uploads. The public senses that only the real thing will do.
Cowel captures the backstory, the panache of the era, in his main character Joe Shelby, the archetypical war correspondent. The arc of experience from Vietnam through all the world’s troubled spots up to the mini-Stalingrads in today’s Syria is captured in the emotional narrative. There is also a thriller-type, who-dunnit story stuck in the novel to be “plot.” Compared to the true story of Marie Colvin, the thriller plot is a weak construct. A fascinating aside is that the bad guy is a journalist whose style is to be something of an aggregator, a purveyor of other people’s reporting.

But the charismatic Joe Shelby carries the book to a tender and satisfying, if somewhat surprising, ending.

Posted on Amazon August 24, 2012




Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Van Gogh Museum


Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. My wife Minche and I visited the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It is one of the finest museums dedicated to the work of one artist that I have seen. Approximately 200 of his paintings and a vast collection of letters and some drawings are in the museum. You follow his at once fabulous and tortured life story from beginning to tragic end.

There are a lot of paintings that I saw that I appreciated more than his most famous ones, which are featured in every art history book. The above painting "Landscape at Twilight 1890" is one of the most remarkable and beautiful paintings I have ever seen -- but you really need to see it in person and from about 10 to 20 feet away. It is at a distance that Van Gogh's colorful technique has its greatest impact; standing right in front of the painting doesn't do it.

In addition to the Van Goghs, there is a nice small collection of art from his contemporaries from the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Van Gogh is a guy who has put Rembrandt and the other high Dutch Renaissance painters in the shade, whose art is at the Rijksmuseum about 300 meters away. A very impressive performance.

Jazz Soprano at Paris


Jessye Norman at the Olympia in Paris June 2012. My wife and I saw jazz soprano Jessye Norman sing the jazz and supper club standards at the great Paris music hall, the Olympia, on a Tuesday night in June on our Paris trip. These were standards from the Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and other American greats. Plus the Josephine Baker classic, "Deux Amours." (Two Loves). I thought her rendition of the Ellington classic "Stormy Weather" was one of the best I ever heard.

Very memorable to sit in this music auditorium where Edith Piaf gave her last concert and where Mireille Mathieu and other greats gave such magnificent performances. It is to sit and listen to the melody of Paris float by.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Ebook - Monaco, Onassis and Prince Rainier




French Sketches:  Monaco, Onassis, and Prince Rainier

This French Sketch is up and available at Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iPad, Smashwords and other ebook retailers for $.99. This is the third in the series.


In 1950, twenty-seven-year-old Prince Rainier succeeded his grandfather as sovereign prince of the little principality of Monaco on the French Riviera. The city-state’s principal attractions were the renowned casino at Monte Carlo and the beautiful belle époque Hotel de Paris. Unfortunately, the Russian nobility and English aristocrats who had lost fortunes at the casino were long gone. Into these impecunious circumstances sailed international tanker tycoon Aristotle Onassis who bought majority control of SBM, the holding company that owned the casino and hotel.

Onassis had new money and old ideas about how to make Monaco prosperous again. He wanted to cater to a small audience of the very wealthy. In contrast, Prince Rainier wanted to develop a modern and larger market of well-to-do tax exiles, high income people attracted to favorable tax rates and beautiful Riviera weather. A power struggle between the two visions evolved over the next fifteen years until in the mid-1960s Rainier vanquished Onassis with the help of Charles de Gaulle, president of France.

Along the way Rainier married movie star Grace Kelly in the greatest fairytale wedding of the twentieth century. In a more roguish manner, Onassis embarked on high profile affairs with opera diva Maria Callas, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Kennedy, often using his luxurious yacht Christina O as a floating rendezvous for assignation, a perfect symbol for the lust, greed, and status seeking behind these tabloid romances.

Free ebook code GR83U at Smashwords thru Jul 10


Free Ebook code GR83U good at Smashwords through July 10, 2012 for my book.

"Paris 1935" free ebook code at Smashwords


Purchase "Paris 1935" for free with 100 percent off coupon cod DP87K at Smashwords in any desired ebook format. Code is good through July 10, 2012.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Free ebook "Paris 1935" for 60 days

You can download a free copy of "Paris 1935" from the Smashwords website using coupon code JB45P through April 30. Smashwords offers Kindle, ePub, PDF, HTML, and every other format known to ereaders. Just download to your computer and then UBS the copy to your ereader. Or read it on your computer. Kindle, Sony, Kobo etc all have free PC versions of their ereader software for download. And there are generic ePub readers via Google. You are welcome to share the code or republish it on your blogs, etc.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Book Review of "Paris 1935"


PARIS 1935: DESTINY’S CROSSROADS
Paul A. Myers, Paul A. Myers Books, 2011, $10.99 pb/$2.99, e-book, 261 pp, 9780982596074

     “. . . Art illuminates politics . . .” says Marcelle Lambert, one of the lead characters in Paris 1935. This summarizes Paul Myers’ approach: writing used as a vehicle to understanding period politics. As Marcelle and Dexter Jones meet and fall in love, a world that desperately wants to avoid another world war makes the missteps that will make one inevitable. Upper-level civil servant Marcelle is detailed to the office of the premier and foreign minister of France, Pierre Laval. Dexter, a savvy young diplomat, stands on the sidelines watching senior diplomats from France and England (Laval and his British counterpart, Sir Samuel Hoare) jockey to save Ethiopia from Italy, protect their national interests, and oh, yes, fulfill their League of Nations commitments as well. The result is the Hoare-Laval Agreement, which then (and now) can be alternately viewed as an act of base appeasement or, as Churchill put it, had it been invoked, “a shrewd, farseeing agreement which could have saved . . . Abyssinia (Ethiopia).” Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler watches intently—and re-militarizes the Rhineland. Marcelle and Dexter plan their wedding. But will they marry, for Marcelle vows she will never desert France? 


    Paris 1935 is a complex book that takes us into the back rooms of high-level officials, writers, and media stars in order to understand why events happened as they did. The book's presentation, both cover and printing, is professional, with the artwork consisting of period reproductions. Involved and intriguing, Myers' work definitely is worth reading. --B.N. Peacock 
Historical Novel Society Online Review Feb. 2012.