Megapolis

"I have lived in a megalopolis since birth, and since birth, I have been inhabited by the big city. It devours me and I devour it. It isn't a separate object, but a mode of being, a rhythm, a pulse, a poetics" Régine Robin shares with us her love of big metropolis - these mutating monsters of blurred, changing contours. Full of energy and passion, she traverses them, wanders through them and sometimes looses herself. Everything can become an object of fascination: the authentic and the artificial, neon light and the sunset, monumental spaces and atmospheric street corners as well as melancholy old districts or intricate speedway interchanges. The new flaneuse of the postmodern era, Robin takes us to Tokyo, New York and London, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. In London, surprises lurk at the end of all metro lines, and in Los Angeles, Harry Bosh, the hero of Michael Connelly's novels becomes our improvised guide. In Buenos Aires reality and the fictional world of the gangster film merge during an attempted armed hostage taking. For these urban meanderings are also journeys between the imaginary, cinema and literature. This travel book is the ultimate anti-tourist guide. Historian, sociologist and writer, Régine Robin has written twenty books including a number of novels. 2001, Berlin chantiers (Stock) was awarded the first Montréal Book prize. She also published La Mémoire saturée with Stock in 2003.