A Farewell in Paris is now up on NOOK!

My latest novel is now up on all the major ebook sites: Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Diesel, Smashwords, etc, for only $2.99.

"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.

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.  

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. 

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

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.