Coffee and Literature: Literary Cafes from Cairo to Paris, by Gérard Georges Lemer

Do you want to drink coffee while reading your favorite book? What is the connection between coffee and literature? Marcel Proust, Sartre, Naguib Mahfouz, Marquez, Borges... all wrote about cafes and were influenced by cafes. Do you know that the development of literature, arts, and politics came from the cafe? Do you know that all literary movements were founded in cafes? Surrealism... Dadaism? Do you know that political parties were established in cafes? Do you know that the first parliament in the world was in a cafe? Do you know that all revolutions emerged from cafes? Do you know that the first literary cafe was in Mecca? This is one of the most beautiful books written about coffee and literature. Cafes played a major role in the history of ideas since the establishment of the cafe in happy Yemen and then its transfer to Mecca, Baghdad, Cairo, then developed in Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire, and gradually entered Europe, starting from the 17th century. The Ottomans called it "schools of knowledge," and cafes in London, Venice, and Paris became universities of knowledge, with impromptu parliaments, press offices, poetic circles, and political clubs. They are laboratories of utopia and revolutions. This book traces the history and legends of some of these cafes. From Rech Cafe where Naguib Mahfouz sits, to Flor Cafe where Sartre and Camus used to be, from the Royal Cafe in London, to Florian Cafe in Venice, to Bombo Madrid, to Slavia Prague in the center of Vienna, this book is a tour in modern literature and its relationship with cafes, and a tour in the books of writers, philosophers, and politicians, where pleasure is paired with knowledge.