Author Description

Because our teaching required us to keep up with France, its culture and its language, Jill and I have returned to France every year whenever University schedules allowed. The snippets collected here are instances, some utterly trivial, some a little less so, of the irreducible differences between our two cultures, of the mistaken ways the French account for American culture, and vice-versa. These are of course caricatures-exaggerations and distortions. However, a caricature whose distortions obscure an essential truth is a failure: we trust ours do not. "By far the most entertaining book I have read by Grossvogel since his Mariage New Yorkais. A shrewd overview of two cultures, something that I can feel, as a Frenchman, when sometimes the shoe pinches." Emile Brami, Histoire de la poupee Jill E. Grossvogel has a doctoral degree in French Literature from Cornell University. She is the author of the two volumes of the catalogue raisonne on the painter Claude Emile Schuffenecker whose exhibitions she curated both in the United States and Europe. She is also a notable graphic artist. David I. Grossvogel is the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on French culture and literature as well as of two recent French novels, Le Journal de Charles Swann and Le Mariage New Yorkais.