The Seine with Elaine Sciolino

December 3, 2020

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

This online program will be streamed live via Zoom.

In The Seine, Elaine Scolino tells the story of the Seine through its rich history and lively characters. Braiding memoir, travelogue, and history through the Seine’s winding route, Sciolino offers a love letter to Paris and the river at its heart and invites readers to explore its magic. She will be joined in conversation by Sanaë Lamoine author of The Margot Affair.

“Written in an enjoyable journalistic style, the book is both a travelog and a cultural history of not only the river itself but the people who have lived, worked, and taken inspiration from it... For readers who have walked along the banks of the Seine or dream of someday doing so, this love letter to a river is highly recommended” - Library Journal (starred review)

In the spring of 1978, as a young journalist in Paris, Elaine Sciolino was seduced by a river. In The Seine, she tells the story of that river through its rich history and lively characters—a bargewoman, a riverbank bookseller, a houseboat dweller, a famous cameraman known for capturing the river’s light. She patrols with river police, rows with a restorer of antique boats, discovers a champagne vineyard, and even dares to swim in the Seine.

Sciolino’s keen eye and vivid prose bring the river to life as she discovers its origins on a remote plateau of Burgundy, where a pagan goddess healed pilgrims at an ancient temple. She follows the Seine to Le Havre, where it meets the sea.

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Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, based in France since 2002. Her latest book, The Seine: The River That Made Paris, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2019. Her previous books include, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, and The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis.

Sciolino was decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, in 2010 for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Scolino graduated summa cum laude from Canisius College and received a master’s degree in French history from New York University. She also holds honorary doctorate degrees from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Canisius College, and Dowling College. She is one of the only American members of Femmes Forum, a Paris-based private club of 200 of the leading women of France.

Sanaë Lamoine born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father and raised in France and Australia. Lamoine received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she taught essay writing and was a writing consultant at the Writing Center. Since then, she’s worked as a recipe writer and editor, and most recently, as a cookbook editor at Phaidon Press and Martha Stewart Books. Her first novel, The Margot Affair, was published by Hogarth Press in June 2020. Lamoine now live in New York.

Free