Local Author Event: David Benjamin
Come meet award-winning Madison author, David Benjamin, as he discusses his memoir An Apartment in Paris.
In this memoir, released in April 2025, David chronicles a harrowing, often hilarious journey through the French real estate labyrinth that ends, almost miraculously, with…
An Apartment in Paris
David Benjamin’s reportorial style and distinctive brand of humor, Benjamin opens the “great doors” of Paris and explores
- the city’s nooks, crannies, courtyards and alleyways
- its breathtaking vistas and its “jewel box” of surprises
- its sometimes grubby and moldy underbelly
- the weird legal intricacies of property transfer in La Belle France
- the agony and ecstasy of a French mortgage
Plus
- snippets of Parisian history drawn from the author’s exhaustive research
- a tour of the bistros and cafés of the world’s best city for eating out
- a rich lode of asides, observations and digressions on natives and tourists, the Louvre and lovers, kings, queens and criminals, waiters, bakers and greengrocers, painters and poets
- the most elegant strippers in the world
- and the “guardian angel” who made it possible—
Benjamin says, “Paris has always been a place where impulse triumphs over reason, where a silly romantic notion can cloud your mind and change you forever. This is why, when you see a window in Paris full of real estate ads, you should run for your life.”
About the author: David Benjamin has a lifetime of stories to tell, dates all the way back to Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wis.
Since then, Benjamin has become the author of an eclectic range of both fiction and non-fiction and the founder in 2019 of his own publishing imprint, Last Kid Books. His publishing concern is the namesake of Benjamin’s fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House and reprinted in a 2020 revised version by Last Kid Books.
In its first five years, Last Kid Books’ wide-ranging catalog of titles have garnered more than thirty awards for literary excellence, in a dozen-plus genres, from independent publishing organizations. Among these honors is the 2021 grand prize for literary/historical and contemporary fiction in the Midwest Book Awards for They Shot Kennedy, and a Silver Medal in the category of humor for Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Books published under Benjamin’s imprint since its founding in 2019 are all listed, summarized and available at www.lastkidbooks.com.
Benjamin’s lively explanation of sumo wrestling, under the Tuttle Publishing imprint, SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport, has been continuously in print since 1990.
In his journalism career, Benjamin has been editor of the Mansfield (Mass.) News, where he earned nine awards for editorial excellence, and Tokyo Journal in Japan. He was a columnist, in Tokyo, for the Japan Times Weekly, the Mainichi Daily News and the weekly Shukan Bunshun.
Benjamin’s essays have appeared in a broad range of national periodicals including the New York Times. Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, Capital Times and EE Times.