Flâneuse

A gender-bending cultural meander through the world's great cities, unveiling the liberating possibilities of a good walk.In Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin captures the imagination with her distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York and transports readers to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London. Part cultural exploration, part memoir, Elkin charts the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship women have with the metropolis.From the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Elkin illuminates the paths beaten by flâneuses through literature, art, history, and film. With tenacity and insight, she creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, challenging the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon."Deliciously spiky and seditious" (The Guardian), Flâneuse is a gender-bending cultural history that will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself. A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.