Includes index.

Balzac's Girl with the golden eyes : Parisian masks, not faces --Zola's L'assommoir : Paris's stranglehold on the lives of the poor -- D'Annunzio's Child of pleasure : a city's power of seduction -- Rilke's Notebooks : Paris and the pantoms of the past -- Proust's Remembrance of things past : Venice and the reality within the dream -- Bely's Saint Petersburg : a city conjured by a visionary symbolist -- Romain's Death of a nobody : a city's collective soul -- Dos Passos's Manhattan transfer : the death of a metropolis -- Durrell's Alexandria quartet : "a whore among cities" -- Butor' Passing time : the equivocal reality of a city.