From the author of The Transitive Vampire, comes an invitation to a strangely illuminated City of Light, Paris out of Hand. This seductively beautiful replica of a 19th-century travel book - replete with illustrations of sights you will never see and maps that may plummet you into a different era - guides readers through the Paris that is, that might be, and that never was. Amid the Parisian locales you know and love, unheard-of temptations abound. If your visit to the Cafe Conjugal ends in a spat, you can make up at the luscious and fantastic Museum of Lips and Books. From the disconcerting Brasserie Loplop, steal your chair for the Cinema Pont Neuf, whose movies flow onto the Seine. Your curiosity sated for the day, check into Hotel des Etrangers, where phantoms change the sheets and your room in the middle of the night. Unhandy glossaries help you talk your way through these provocative encounters, with such apropos comments as J'aimerais sortir avec votre hyene pour boire un verre (I'd like to take your hyena out for a drink). A rare and rowdy entertainment that dares its readers to explore a Paris one can only wish existed.

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Barbara Hodgson is a book designer and writer. In addition to her three novels, The Tattooed Map, The Sensualist and Hippolyte's Island, she is the co-author of Paris Out of Hand, and Italy Out of Hand. Her non-fiction works include The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany, Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon and In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine and Patent Medicines. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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