An American in Paris

“In the States, celibacy had never been my strong suit. In Paris, it was a crime against nature—a mortal sin.” With this cheeky response to her new city, Henri Adams—recently released from the tyranny of Prohibition and freshly appointed as an art correspondent for En Vogue magazine—sets out to discover the literary, artistic, and more unmentionable pleasures of Paris during the Roaring Twenties. Welcomed with open arms by Gertrude Stein (and somewhat more soberly by Alice B. Toklas), Henri hobnobs with expatriate luminaries—Natalie Barney, Picasso, Colette, Romaine Brooks, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes—and unleashes her Yankee curiosity, only to find herself entangled in an avant-garde art theft ring and the shackles of Paris’ sapphic underground. Gay Paris more than lives up to its name in this prequel to Vandenburg’s most recent novel, Craze, a Jazz Age portrait of queer New York.