From the author of The Transitive Vampire, comes an invitation to a strangely illuminated City of Light, Paris out of Hand. This seductively beautiful replica of a 19th-century travel book—replete with illustrations of sights you will never see and maps that may plummet you into a different era—guides readers through the Paris that is, that might be, and that never was. Amid the Parisian locales you know and love, unheard-of temptations abound. If your visit to the Cafe Conjugal ends in a spat, you can make up at the luscious and fantastic Museum of Lips and Books. From the disconcerting Brasserie Loplop, steal your chair for the Cinema Pont Neuf, whose movies flow onto the Seine. Your curiosity sated for the day, check into Hotel des Etrangers, where phantoms change the sheets and your room in the middle of the night. Unhandy glossaries help you talk your way through these provocative encounters, with such apropos comments as J'aimerais sortir avec votre hyene pour boire un verre (I'd like to take your hyena out for a drink). A rare and rowdy entertainment that dares its readers to explore a Paris one can only wish existed.

The conceit behind this playful, charming spoof of a book is as simple and bizarre as a Magritte painting: it is a guide to an imaginary Paris, complete with fake hotel listings, off-the-wall travel advice and restaurant recommendations that aim more at literary than culinary edification. In Gordon's Paris, tourists may stop at the Grand Hotel des Echecs, home to a clientele made up of chess lovers and losers ("echecs" means both "chess" and "failures" in French); dine at the Caf Dada, where one inserts food into an Automat and is fed foreign coins in return; or take in a film at the Cinma l'Ange des Sables, which shows only movies shot in the desert. "Ici on parle angoisse" ("Anguish spoken here"), Gordon informs us of one hotel. Admirers of Gordon's previous work, which includes the popular grammar handbook The Transitive Vampire and the novel The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, will not be surprised to find her drawing heavily on the work of such writers as Paul Valry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Raymond Queneau for her wealth of puns, wordplay and double-entendres. This is not a book to read cover to cover, but rather to dip into when the appetite strikes. When the absurdist humor gets too coy or heavy-handed, readers may refresh themselves by studying the surrealist collages and illustrations illuminating every page. Meticulously drawn, finely detailed and brimming with whimsy, they are happily reminiscent of those in Bantock's own Griffin & Sabine books. (Oct.)

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