American poet Emily Dickinson remains an enigma to this day. She was born in 1830 and died 55 years later in the same house. She never married or had children. Dickinson wrote over a thousand poems, of which fewer than ten were published during her lifetime. She rarely left her hometown of Amherst.

"Paper Cities" is a vivid literary portrait of a writer capable of creating entire worlds without leaving her own garden. Weaving biographical details with her own fantasies, Dominique Fortier crafts a profound and delicate narrative about the freedom of imagination and the nature of creativity, about the places we live in and those that live within us.

Dominique Fortier is a writer and translator born in Quebec in 1972. She earned a PhD in French literature from McGill University and worked in various publishing houses. The author of five novels, she is a laureate of the French Gens de mer Prize and the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. "Paper Cities" was awarded the prestigious Renaudot Prize for essays in 2020.

The book's design features a herbarium collected by Emily Dickinson.