title: Writer's France: A Regional Panorama
author:  John Ardagh 
description: A highly illustrated survey of French landscape and townscape and their influence on French and foreign writers.
zlib_text:  
  
   
  An adolescent boy sails to the remote monasteries and hermitages of
  Mount Athos. His spiritual and erotic wanderings in the picturesque
  surroundings of the Holy Mountain take both the author and the reader on a
  journey of self-discovery.
  Augiéras described Athos as a place where you “find everything within
  yourself”, and the experiences in this book as “a sojourn in the Land of the
  Spirits according to the strictest Buddhist or Pythagorean Orthodoxy”.
  Depicted variously as an anti-Christian nomad, a barbarian in the West
  and a madman, Augiéras is one of France’s greatest underground writers.
  
   
  F������� A������� was born in 1925 in Rochester, New York. His
  father was a French pianist, his mother a Polish emigrée. After the death of
  his father he returned to Paris, spending his adolescence in Périgord, which
  was to be his refuge during a life of restless wandering.
  In 1945 he went to Algiers, and remained there for a year, living with
  his reclusive uncle, a retired colonel, and in 