The Barbizon

I didn't know very much about the Barbizon but I read a review of this book and it captured my imagination. The book was very compelling and enjoyable to me! It's largely a string of anecdotes but the anecdotes are baller. I was reading this at lunch at work and I kept putting it down to announce to the breakroom random things like “this bitch got famous off French onion soup during prohibition!”

Iconic tbh

It's an interesting microcosm of a particular moment in history, and Bren is pretty aware and explicit about the limitations of this history (eg the hotel was white-only for a long time and even after its first Black resident, like....mostly white). But I dug reading about some of the random non-famous residents just as much as I did about Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. Definitely an enjoyable read if you're interested in the subject!