Featured on public radio: Reading Romance Between (And Under) The Covers June 26, 2012 NPR’s Mary Bly says that a few years ago, Baldwin (whose first novel, You Lost Me There, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2010), wangled himself a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency in Paris, even though he couldn’t speak more than pidgin French. He began with breast-feeding pamphlets and over a year and a half graduated to taglines about belts. But Baldwin and his wife, Rachel — as well as the Parisians he came to know — are funny and idiosyncratic, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with them. Like all “innocent-abroad” memoirs, some of the most charming bits describe translation errors. I loved the moment when his wife memorized a tradesman’s message and carefully repeated it when Baldwin got home: Je ne parle pas tres bien Francais, which turned out to her surprise to be a helpful message the tradesman suggested she might like to repeat frequently: to wit, “I don’t speak very good French.”