Ellis Avery, The Last Nude

Five years ago a young writer, Ellis Avery, came to Buffalo to promote her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, then recently published to glowing reviews. Talking Leaves presented her reading at Tru Teas, the late, lamented, sorely missed teahouse on Elmwood Avenue, to an enthusiastic audience. Ms. Avery has just published a second novel, The Last Nude (Riverhead), a stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the world wars, and she has generously agreed to share her new work with us, this time at our Main Street store, on Wednesday, February 22, at 7 pm. The reading is free and open to the public. As always, we urge those attending to purchase a copy of the book as an act of encouragement and support for the author, publisher and bookstore.

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.

Emma Donoghue, author of Room, says “as erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it, Avery’s artist-muse love story is as much about money, class, and betrayal.” Critical acclaim for the book since it’s release in early January has been extraordinary—stars from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, raves from major newspapers and NPR, with words like dazzling, affecting, stunning, breathtaking, absorbing pouring from the pens of critics.

Ellis Avery is the author of two acclaimed novels and an award-winning memoir about 9/11. She lives in New York City and teaches fiction writing at Columbia University.