if not, Paris

The heat wave is gone. PSG won last night. The city was on fire in the best of ways. Tourist season is upon us. The days are busy. We threw a life-giving party for SOUVENIR Magazine last night. The novel must go on—a subtle promise to oneself, thrice delayed, to finish a draft before going on vacation. It’s the season of sunshine, and so music, too. Below is an improvisation that includes a few different elements of songs I’ve written to mirror the cumulous clouds above the cemetery.

In the Land of the Impressionists Like a thirty-thousand-piece puzzle laser-cut from the stories that make up a life, there are fragments everywhere—at the edge of the table, hidden in the cream carpet on the floor, stuck beneath one of the pieces you thought you’d lost during the move—and most of the ideas that move me to keep writing novels do not come…

You stand in front of a purring bright orange sports car whose tinted windows reflect the cloud blue skies above. Atop the hood of the car is a tall cup of Starbucks Coffee. You wave at the tinted windows at your own reflection, play a quick game of charades with the faceless person within, gesturing that there’s steaming hot coffee atop the car. The robot in your pocket sends you a message: Genesis is arriving.

Dear friend, It’s been a while since my last missive. The world is full of curious free spirits and small-minded egotists alike, and with unlimited access to their endless opinions about everything happening under the sun—with all of these podcasts and newsletters, it’s almost as if people forget about all the books—I haven’t felt the call to newsletter arms of late. Winter, for me, is about hibernation and countryside quiet.

As a small token of my appreciation to those who support working artists, here’s an improvised piano tune, a melodic soundtrack for this piece. Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. I’m sitting on a train bound for Milan to spend a few days strolling the city before training onwards to Venice. Augusta Sagnelli and I are celebrating our 5th anniversary, and Augusta happens to have work in these foreign lands.

an early March morning at Saint Sulpice In 1974, the experimental French author Georges Perec spent three days sitting at the Café de la Mairie (75006) on Place Saint Sulpice and wrote what he saw, resulting in “Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien” (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris). Over the past few years, I’ve sat many times at the Café de la Mairie, which is where I often meet walking tour clients to recount the history of the this fair city. Part I. Part II.

John Sannaee’s A Tentative Gardener’s Guide to the Evening (Kingdom Anywhere, 2026) explores the relationship between humans, the other beings of the natural world, and one another. His poems also examine his own search for belonging and his relationship to place, as well as the aesthetics of softness and violence.

essays in the hills above Saint-Tropez “Pieces of Places” by Augusta Sagnelli 1 You’re sitting atop a verdant hill, somewhere inland from the February blue waters of Saint Tropez. A hooting owl. A whistling wind. The roar of a suped-up motorcycle breaking the silence, its engine built to shorten the distance between where we are and where we think we want to be. The chip-chapping of the chiffchaffs—that’s what they’re called, aren’t they?—who’ve migrated here to escape the Palearctic cold.

It was the best of performances, it was the worst of performances, it was the age of salsa, it was the age of lip-syncing, it was the epoch of global celebrity, it was the epoch of Christian nationalists—in short, the two Super Bowl halftime performances can be summed up in their two most prominent messages: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” and “It ain’t easy bein’ country in this country nowadays.” Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, AKA Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl...

Simon de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre, 1955 The Nazis occupied Paris for 1,518 days. Some 1,500 days later, Paris was home to one of the most influential philosophical movements in human history.