The Last Nude by Ellis Avery (English) Paperback Book

$44.30 Buy It Now, FREE Shipping, 30-Day Returns, eBay Money Back Guarantee
Seller: the_nile ✉️ (1,208,510) 98.2%, Location: Melbourne, AU, Ships to: WORLDWIDE, Item: 145675575229 The Last Nude by Ellis Avery (English) Paperback Book. The Nile on eBay  

The Last Nude

by Ellis Avery

Inspired by real events in Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka's history, "The Last Nude" is a tour de force of historical imagination. 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.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

"As erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it."—Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Paris, 1927. 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 support herself, 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. A tour de force of historical imagination, The Last Nude is about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.

Author Biography

Ellis Avery's first novel, The Teahouse Fire, set in the tea ceremony world of nineteenth-century Japan, has been translated into five languages and has won three awards, including the American Library Association Stonewall Award. Avery was also the author of The Smoke Week, an award-winning 9/11 memoir. She taught fiction writing at Columbia University.

Review

"[An] amazing book . . . wholly original and engrossing."—The Boston Globe

"The Last Nude breaks important ground for literature, and does so with exuberance, skill, and grace."—San Francisco Chronicle

"A compulsively readable novel."—The Washington Post

"A taut, elegant novel . . . [Avery's] prose sings."—MORE Magazine

"Seductive and compelling, the novel is painted with as much drama and precision as one of Lempicka's canvases."—The Daily Beast

"A sly, sleekly written stereograph of art, desire, and desperation in Paris in the '20s, The Last Nude brings Rafaela to electric life, much as Tamara de Lempicka did when she painted her."—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh 

"The Last Nude is a remarkable novel: at once a seductive evocation of Lost Generation Paris, a faithful literary rendering of Tamara de Lempicka's idiosyncratic and groundbreaking art, and a vibrant, intelligent, affecting story in its own right. It's also smoking hot."—Emily Barton, author of Brookland

"Ellis Avery transports the reader on a fast-paced magic-carpet ride to Paris between the world wars, a time when artists, patrons, and models fused the business of sex and art, with deeply painful results."—Aaron Hamburger, author of Faith for Beginners

"The Last Nude carries us through one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods in modern art, and into the minds and bodies of two of art history's most riveting heroines. With prose and imagery that are both lyrical and unabashedly sensual, Ellis Avery breathes life and depth into famed artist's muse Rafaela, tracing her rocky but thrilling path from lost girl to Lost Generation icon, and laying bare acts of love, desire and betrayal with all the assuredness of a master artist herself."—Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of The Painter from Shanghai

Review Quote

"[An] amazing book

Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION 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. ABOUT ELLIS AVERY Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire .The winner of three awards, The Teahouse Fire was translated into five languages. Avery teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City. A CONVERSATION WITH ELLIS AVERY Q. What about this second novel-a technique, or a subject-was a stretch for you? My first novel, The Teahouse Fire , was about the tea ceremony of Meiji-era Japan. Because the subject matter was one most American readers know little to nothing about, I felt an almost missionary obligation to offer the reader everything I knew about that world-to lecture, really-and the book is paced accordingly. My second novel, The Last Nude , takes place in Paris between the wars, a setting about which most readers know at least a little, and many readers know far more than I. It isn''t news that flappers listened to jazz in the twenties, or that Europe in the forties was a bad place to be if you were Jewish. This time around, I had to learn how not to lecture but to converse, how to give the reader the pleasure of supplying missing information, how to leave things out. The result of leaving things out is, I hope, a more fast-paced novel than my first. I went into this book thinking about the various pitfalls artists can encounter-surfeit in Tamara de Lempicka''s case, loss in Anson Hall''s, history in Rafaela Fano''s-and I knew that if I was writing a novel about something as un-American as failure, I should at least try to make it sexy and suspenseful. Q. Between the moment you first thought of writing The Last Nude and the moment you finished it, what in the story or in your conception of Tamara and Rafaela changed most? At first, I had no idea I would wind up writing sixty pages in the first person from Tamara''s point of view. As I discovered a year and a half after having done so, adding her voice meant that, as Tamara, I could skip over things that, as Rafaela, I would have needed to expand on. To that end, I condensed 110 pages from Rafaela''s point of view into two sentences from Tamara''s, resulting in a leaner if somewhat darker book. Cutting out a quarter of my novel at the last minute of the editing process reweighted the story away from Rafaela''s coming-of-age and onto the vexed relationship between the two women: now I think the book bears down more squarely on a key question: What did the affair mean to each of them? The other thing that changed most is that I initially imagined an unabashedly happy ending for Rafaela: I saw her in California, living with a nice woman she''d met while studying the bodywork techniques pioneered by Ida Rolf. Groovy, huh? This ending was total fantasy, extraneous to the central action of the story, and very like the ending of my first novel, The Teahouse Fire . That novel takes place in the Victorian period, and offers a self-consciously Victorian ending: Good is rewarded, love comes at last. Most of the action of The Last Nude takes place in 1927, so ultimately it felt wrong to force a Victorian ending onto a Jazz Age novel. What''s more, in the next decades, so many Jews were killed in Europe that to report Rafaela''s survival without making the story of how she survived the focus of the book would be to disrespect the millions who died. Q. At what points did you find you had to change a fact in order to make a better fiction? First, if Tamara''s apartment and the train station had been on the same side of the Seine, there would have been no need for Rafaela to cross the river on a crucial occasion toward the end of the book. For that reason, although the biographical Tamara-whom I got to know through the excellent work of Laura Claridge-lived in what was at the time the newish-money Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris, my fictional Tamara lives in the old-money Seventh. Second, when I finished my first novel, set in 1880s Japan, I promised myself that my next book would be about English speakers. Of course, next thing you know, I''m fired up to write about a Polish painter who grew up speaking French. Partly because the biographical Tamara never specified the biographical Rafaela''s nationality or origins, and largely for my own sake, to avoid writing another book full of translated dialogue, I have taken the liberty of imagining an English-speaking Rafaela. Third, and most interesting to me as a writer, there''s a quietly counterfactual strand to this novel, which appears in the character of Anson Hall. Hemingway buffs will wonder why Anson has the first name of one of Hemingway''s grandfathers and the last name of the other, and also why I have claimed the story that Hemingway''s wife lost all his manuscripts on a train as Anson''s story. While Hemingway overcame the loss of his manuscripts and went on to write his great first novels, Anson Hall is the man Hemingway would have become if he had never overcome that loss: a nicer person than Ernest Hemingway, but a sadder one, too. In thinking about the pitfalls artists can encounter, I wanted to play out the consequences of creative failure, which for me meant envisioning a world in which certain works of art had never come into being. I suspect that the world we live in is a poorer place for its paucity of artworks by women and other oppressed peoples, but a negative assertion lacks the force of example. So I needed to eliminate a real artist. I know I poke fun at James Joyce in this novel, however much I owe the inspiration for Tamara''s final monologue to Molly Bloom, but I wanted to make a sacrifice that actually pained me, so Hemingway was the author whose life story I altered. What would 1927 Paris be if The Sun Also Rises hadn''t come out in 1926? Jazz Age Paris without Hemingway in it-and an interwar literary tradition in which Gabriele D''Annunzio''s name replaced Hemingway''s-would be pallid indeed, and my own life without A Moveable Feast in it would be so much the poorer. Q. Could the relationship between Tamara and Rafaela have happened anytime, or do you see it as specific to Paris in the twenties? I don''t see Paris in the twenties as simply the setting in which the biographical Tamara happened to be painting when she created Beautiful Rafaela , the painting that inspired this book. Rather, what''s remarkable about expatriate Jazz Age Paris is that it provided an environment in which a number of different kinds of romantic and sexual relationships between women flourished in a way they rarely had before. You know the examples as well as I: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, Bryher and H.D., to say nothing of Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall-and did Virginia Woolf ever make it to Paris? My point is, in the 1920s, and especially in Paris, you see a concentration of lesbians in the arts, and at the center of the modernist movements in literature and painting especially, that strikes me as singular and profoundly exciting. These circles, however, have already been documented by top-notch scholars and biographers, and I''d be bored if I stuck to dramatizing the research of others. Rather, I was interested in a world in which two women like Tamara and Rafaela can have an affair and have vastly different interpretations of what it means. It''s not like Rafaela thinks she''s inventing a new category of relationship from scratch when she falls in love with Tamara: surrounded by appealing models of what look to her like marriages between women, she imagines she''s embarking on one of them. At the same time, this is so long before Stonewall-let alone before same-sex marriage becomes legal anywhere-that Tamara can see what she''s engaging in solely in terms of sexual freedom, or decadent naughtiness, or a painter''s prerogative: certainly nothing remotely related to marriage. So I see the relationship between Tamara and Rafaela as specific to this time and place, which was one in which sexual acts between women seemed more possible than in preceding or subsequent decades and one in which the meaning of those acts was perhaps even more up for grabs than it is today. (My partner Sharon Marcus''s scholarly work on nineteenth-century marriage between women has influe

Details ISBN1594486476 Author Ellis Avery Short Title LAST NUDE Language English ISBN-10 1594486476 ISBN-13 9781594486470 Media Book Format Paperback Residence US Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-12-31 Series Riverhead Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-12-31 NZ Release Date 2012-12-31 US Release Date 2012-12-31 UK Release Date 2012-12-31 Pages 352 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S. DEWEY 813.6 Audience General

We've got this

At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love!


TheNile_Item_ID:48560412;
  • Condition: Brand new
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-13: 9781594486470
  • Author: Ellis Avery
  • Book Title: The Last Nude
  • ISBN: 9781594486470

PicClick Insights - The Last Nude by Ellis Avery (English) Paperback Book PicClick Exclusive

  •  Popularity - 0 watchers, 0.0 new watchers per day, 10 days for sale on eBay. 0 sold, 3 available.
  •  Best Price -
  •  Seller - 1,208,510+ items sold. 1.8% negative feedback. Great seller with very good positive feedback and over 50 ratings.

People Also Loved PicClick Exclusive