Paris Beckons—Susanna Solomon launches her new short story collection
It was a full house at Susanna Solomon’s launch at Book Passage in Marin County Saturday, February 11 for her latest short story collection Paris Beckons. Over 50 people attended and ate 152 French pastries and drank nine bottles of French wine and over 33 books were sold.
Mill Valley Literary Review editor extraordinaire John Macon King was introduced to these stories a few years ago and premiered some of them in Mill Valley Literary Review.
King states: “Susanna Solomon’s fantastical musings reveal a clandestine Paris of temptation, imagination and unease—ghostly “Shakespeare & Company,” time-bending “The Clock,” Twilight-Zone-esque “The Teddy Bear,” and Oscar-Wilde-reminiscent “Hello, Human.” Other tales derail the mind’s comfort zones—risky soul-searching in “Among My Own Kind,” braving Parisian streets as a first-time motorcyclist in “Julia,” and communing with a Musee D’Orsay sculpture which thinks outside the box in “The Dancer.” Deft, whimsical, with the hovering shadow of a domineering father, these stories rank among Solomon’s best.”
–J.Macon King, Mill Valley Literary Review. Author of Circus of the Sun, and Drinking with a Dead Cat.
Of her work, Susanna says:
“In 1963, when I had just turned 14, my father told me that he was going to Paris to be alone. I believed him. Instead, he went to be with his mistress, an event that changed the trajectory of my family’s life forever. When he returned, my mother confronted him, and when he lied to her, fed up and in despair, she took her own life. Fifty years later, when I returned, and long after he was gone, I had to see Paris again.
“The result is Paris Beckons, my short story collection told in the voice of a first-person narrator, Nina, who starts out by following in her father’s footsteps on his fateful trip to Paris in 1963. She’d remembered going there as a child but when she returned to the same places as a middle-aged woman she was surprised to find her parents beside her. Confronting them gave her a chance to heal. When she returns home, she is transformed.
“In this collection, Nina finds her mother standing beside her while holding her hand on the Quai, her father criticizing her at museums, and her lost brother playing with Nina at Place de Vosges. Some of the stories are whimsical, while others are gripping.”
Susanna is the author of Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, and the novel Montana Rhapsody.
