Finding Dora Maar - An Artist, an Address Book, a Life

Brigitte Benkemoun is a journalist and writer. She is the author of 'La petite fille sur la photo' (2012) and 'Albert le magnifique' (2016). Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. She has translated some thirty books from French, including, most recently, Roland Barthes's 'Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts' (2018), Michel Pastoureau's 'Yellow: History of a Color' (2019), and Jean Giono's 'Occupation Journal' (2020).

"With a novelist's eye for detail, Benkemoun takes readers on a journey full of surprises as she researches and reimagines the landscape of Dora Maar's life in Surrealism and its aftermath. Guided by the scant details in Maar's address book, which came into the author's hands by chance, she reweaves the mesh of avant-garde artistic life in mid-twentieth-century France, taking us along with her as this serendipitous tale unfolds. It's well worth the trip, an informative, enjoyable read."--Carolyn Burke, author of Lee Miller: A Life; Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury; and other books "Part detective story, part social history, part excellent gossip, Finding Dora Maar uses the miracle of a found address book to reconstruct the life of an important woman artist who knew everyone." --Francine Prose, author of Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, and the New York Times bestselling Reading Like A Writer