Alex Andriesse – författare

Celebrity, seductress, covert diplomat. Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione, was the original "famous for being famous" It Girl. This thrilling, transporting biography explores the countessa's fascinating, provocative, and dramatic life in all its mess and glory.Virginia Verasis, Countess of Castiglione—the nineteenth-century aristocrat, socialite, and beauty—has become famous for the enigmatic and operatic photographs of herself that she choreographed and staged, now seen as masterworks of the art. But her life story is no less extraordinary than her artistic vision, as Benedetta Craveri shows us in this groundbreaking new biography, which draws on archival material and the countess's own diaries to piece together the puzzle that was Virginia.Eighteen years old when Victor Emmanuel I sent her to Paris on a special assignment, and already renowned as a beauty in her native Italy, Virginia was tapped to persuade Napoleon III to support the cause of Italian unification. Her entrance into the haut monde of Paris was unlike anything anyone had ever seen—a performance by a performer who made the world her stage. When Italy became a kingdom with the emperor's backing in 1861, it was in no small part thanks to the role that Virginia had played. But it was not a role that she necessarily wished to play. She wanted to be free at all costs—sexually, financially, artistically—and she resented men's weaponization of her beauty.The Contessa reveals a woman of many facets and at least as many contradictions, vain and visionary, charming and monstrous, impossible to know and impossible to ignore.

A haunting sci-fi fantasy about a world where women are hidden away, men cultivate living statues, and a there is a mysterious rebellion on the rise, now in English for the first time.In an unnamed country where the men cultivate statues and the women are nowhere to be seen, a traveler takes a room at an inn. One foggy morning, a mysterious man invites him to take him on a tour of the walled estates, introducing him to the gardeners’ rich, strange culture. But as time wears on—and the traveler’s landlord pours scorn upon the gardens and gardeners—he feels compelled to set out through ruined estates and depopulated wilderness, to the northern steppes, where a renegade chieftain is said to have rallied the violent nomadic hordes to his cause. But what is this cause? And will this world of men, which has sealed women away behind walls within walls, survive the injustice eating away at its roots?A cult novel in France, The Statuary Gardens is the first book in Jacques Abeille’s multivolume series Cycle des Contrées. A tale of science fiction and high adventure, it is at the same time a meditation on art, culture, inattention, and patriarchy which bears comparison with its influences— Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Dino Buzatti—as well as with other world-building works of art, such as Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books or the films of Hayao Miyazaki.This is the first time Abeille’s work has appeared in English.