Paris 60

Paris 60 is sixty short entries, some fictionalized and some factual, recorded across a Paris spring and written against the template of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. The number is the structure: sixty prose pieces, a modern poet's city set beside the nineteenth-century one that named the prose poem. Jaffe wrote them on a two-month sabbatical in 2008, working the city as a self-styled flaneur and self-acknowledged outsider.

The book sits squarely in the docufiction project Harold Jaffe spent four decades developing: short prose that intersects journal, essay, narrative, and verse, taking documentary source material and treating it with minimal but pointed intervention that lets the original telling expose its own ideology. Citing Gramsci, Jaffe embraces the activist writer who, like the Baudelaire of Paris Spleen, seeks to turn melancholy into a principle of conquest. The book has been translated for readers in Romania, Turkey, France, Japan, Italy, and Cuba.

It is the late-period Jaffe taking his method on the road and pressing it against the city that invented the form he had been working in all along.