Why Hemingway became a bestseller after the Paris attacks
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This week's question: What book became a bestseller in the wake of the attacks in Paris?
Ernest Hemingway's Paris memoir, "A Moveable Feast," shot to the top of the bestseller list on Amazon's French site after the attacks there earlier this month. Several bookstores around the city also reported a spike in sales.
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The memoir covers the years Hemingway spent in France during the 1920s, rubbing shoulders and sipping cocktails with the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.
The book's French title — "Paris est une fête" — translates as "Paris is a party." The phrase comes from Hemingway's ode to the city.
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," he wrote, "Then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
As Agence France-Presse reported, "paperback versions are being deposited, along with flowers and candles, in front of bullet-ridden windows at one of the Paris bars targeted by the jihadist gunmen."
The book's French publisher, Folio, told The Guardian that as many as 8,500 copies had been ordered in the last week — more than they usually sell in an entire year.
The Guardian says the title — "Paris is a party" — has struck "a chord with a mood of defiance in the wake of the attacks."
The coordinated shootings and suicide bombings are the second time the city has been shaken by terrorist violence this year. In January, 12 people were killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine.
It was recently announced that Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief, Stephane Charbonnier, finished his memoirs just two days before he was killed in the attack. Charbonnier's book, "Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the True Enemies of Free Expression," will be published in January.