We'll Always Have Paris

We'll Always Have Paris, published in 2009 when Bradbury was eighty-nine, is the most explicitly nostalgic of all his collections, and nostalgia in his hands is never mere sentimentality but something closer to grief. The twenty-two stories here are saturated with longing: for Paris, for the past, for versions of himself that no longer exist.

Several stories are set in Europe, drawing on his travels with his wife Marguerite in the 1950s. Paris in particular meant something to him that he found difficult to articulate: it was the city where the past was still physically present, where you could walk streets that Hemingway and Fitzgerald had walked, where time seemed thinner.

The collection is a farewell of sorts, and Bradbury knew it. The stories are quieter than his early work, more inward, more willing to sit with uncertainty and loss. He was not afraid of either. He had always believed that the proper response to mortality was not denial but attention, and We'll Always Have Paris is a book entirely about paying attention to things before they go.