The secret histories of the world's most famous writers, painters and musicians.
According to this tongue-in-cheek travel guide, Toulouse-Lautrec, with the aid of one M. Menottes, a benefactor and fellow brothel-goer, opened a little shop in Brussels called Lautrec Handbags. Virginia Woolf, in an effort to find a place for her feminist squad to convene, established a cafe called A Room of One's Own-after her not-yet-published book-which, after her death, was renamed Virginia Woolf's Restaurant and went from specializing in vegetarian foods for the literati to pushing burger specials to tourists. "After the initial publishing of Don Quixote, Cervantes fell into a kind of post-partum depression," he writes, and goes on to explain how Cervantes opened an eponymous institute in Orange, Calif., specializing in "psychological problems associated with male mid-life crisis." Some 40-odd other little tales, none over two pages-concerning businesses established by Hemingway (the titular garage), Camus (cognac), Racine (Danish Kringles™), Joyce (pub), Van Gogh (potatoes), Bukowski (jewelry) and Shakespeare (monofilaments)-make up the rest of the volume. It's a sly, original idea carried, perhaps, a bit too far: the volume offers good browsable bits rather than an absorbing narrative. It amuses-and may even momentarily confuse the credulous looking for signs of La Comédie humaine outside Balzac's Balls in Newport Beach, Calif.