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	The Last Nude by Ellis Avery Our Price $25.95 Hardcover In Stock

Ellis Avery

reads from

The Last Nude

Date

Jan

Tuesday
January 17, 2012
7:00 PM

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Directions »

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome novelist ELLIS AVERY for a discussion of her book The Last Nude.

The Last Nude opens in Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash of the stock market, 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 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

Ellis Avery

Ellis Avery studied Japanese tea ceremony for five years in New York and Kyoto, and now teaches creative writing at Columbia University. She is the author of two novels, The Teahouse Fire and The Last Nude, and an award-winning nonfiction book, The Smoke Week: September 11-21, 2001. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and the Kyoto Journal.

Unable to attend a Harvard Book Store author event? You can still pre-order a signed book by one of our visiting authors.

While we can't guarantee fulfillment of a signed book pre-order, our authors are almost always able to sign extra books to fulfill such orders.

Ordering a signed book on harvardsquarebookstore.com:

Add the book to your shopping cart and then click Checkout.
Specify in Order Comments that you want a signed copy of the book.
Please note: online orders for signed copies must be placed at least one business day before the event. If you are ordering the day of, please call us instead.

Ordering a signed book by phone:

Call us at (617) 661-1515 and one of our booksellers will take your order. Specify you'd like a signed copy.
If you are requesting a personalized inscription and/or requesting your book be shipped, we'll need to take down credit card information. If you are planning to pick up the signed book in the store, you can pay on pick-up.

FAQ:

Can I request a personalized inscription?
We are happy to take requests for the author to sign your book to a specific person, but we can't guarantee it. If you do get a personalized inscription, the book will be non-returnable. We will require credit card information when you place the order.

Do signed books cost more?
There is no extra fee for a signed book!

Do I have to pick it up in the store, or can you deliver my signed book?
As with all web or phone orders, we can hold your book for in-store pickup, or ship it anywhere in the country.

I am planning to attend an author event. Do I need to pre-order a book?
No need. We'll be selling books at the event, and nearly all of our events include a signing at the end of the talk.

More questions? Give us a call!

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

General Info
(617) 661-1515
info@harvardsquarebookstore.com

Media Inquiries
(617) 661-1424 x1
tmetal@harvardsquarebookstore.com