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The last nude

"A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars. Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespear...

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Main Author: Avery, Ellis
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Riverhead Books, 2012.
Subjects:
Lempicka, Tamara de, > 1898-1980 > Fiction.
Women painters > Fiction.
Young women > Fiction.
Americans > France > Paris > Fiction.
Artists' models > Fiction.
Paris (France) > Fiction.
Historical fiction > France.
Love stories > France.
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Summary:"A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars. Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance. "--
"A novel by the author of The Teahouse Fire about an artist and a young American woman beginning in 1920's Paris"--
Physical Description:310 p. ; 23 cm.
ISBN:9781594488139 (hardback)
1594488134 (hardback)
Author Notes:Ellis Avery was born on October 25, 1972. She received a bachelor's degree in performance studies from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA in writing from Goddard College. Before moving to New York City, she spent several years in San Francisco working for queer youth organizations. Her first book, The Smoke Week, was her personal account of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Her novels included The Last Nude and The Teahouse Fire. Her other works included a memoir entitled The Family Tooth and a collection of poetry entitled Broken Rooms. She received several awards including the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction, the Golden Crown Literary Society, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She taught fiction writing at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. She died on February 15, 2019 at the age of 46.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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