Literary Theme: What to Look Forward to This Week

As I was putting together a list of possible themes this week, I found myself with several options. On the one hand, tomorrow is the start of Fashion Week in Paris. I love this idea: fashion, fashionable literature, Paris. It all sounded quite lovely. Not to mention a little obvious and entirely lacking in originality.

Then I pushed on the idea a little and thought about how to make the theme a little more interesting (well, to me, at least). This week could also be subtitled "wherein I become an expatriate," because of the impending relocation. While I'm not moving to Paris -- insert sad face here -- I am moving to a place that excites me, and I'm looking forward to the experience of being an expatriate for a few years during which I hope to learn more about another place and absorb some of the culture there. I'll also be writing while I'm there, so the move will have some effect on my work.

What does this have to do with Fashion Week and/or Paris? Well, it's going to be a somewhat indirect connection, but I think I can make it work. I've decided to focus this week on expatriate American writers who moved to Paris (or France in general) after World War I; this includes heavyweights like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a good deal of time there. And best of all, I think I can squeeze fashion into this as well! (I mean, what's more "fashionable" than The Age of Innocence?)

So that's the theme for this week. If these writers are already familiar to you, feel free to skip over the posts, but if not it might be fun to discover a little something about the American literary psyche just after World War I. Gertrude Stein referred to this as "the lost generation": tune in to find out why.