“Riveting” — Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal
“Captivating” — Jim Kelly, Air Mail
“Genius” — Kirkus
“Beguiling … Fascinating” — Publishers Weekly
“A must-read” — Library Journal
“Too arty for me” — R. Crumb
The Woman With Fifty Faces: Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was, by Jonathan Lackman and Zachary J. Pinson, is a nonfiction graphic novel chronicling the elusive life and tumultuous times of Maria Lani.
On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists….
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So many times it seemed like this day would never come. As much faith as I had in this book, I knew that wasn’t enough, that luck always plays a role. So I’m thrilled to say the book actually goes on sale today, with my dream illustrator, my dream publisher, and to date nothing but rave
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The book tour planning is complete, and you’ll have six opportunities to catch us in person. Expect stunning slideshows, scintillating discussion, signed books, and exclusive limited-edition swag. We’re visiting Kinderhook NY, Manhattan, Washington DC, Boston, Easthampton MA, and Brooklyn. Come see us!
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Picasso refused to paint Lani; whether that was out of pride or suspicion is hard to say. To my knowledge, the French-Jewish author Maurice Sachs (pictured below) was the first to record doubts about her, writing archly in his diary in the spring of 1929 about her splashy arrival in Paris. He noted her thin
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The Woman With Fifty Faces appeals to as many audiences as she has faces. Whether your jam is artists, con artists, 20th-century Paris, women’s history, Jewish history, graphic novels, there’s something in this book just for you. So we’re doing wide-ranging events at diverse venues—an art museum, a boutique literary bookstore, a big general-interest one,
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On Tuesday, July 29, at 7pm, we’ll be in the Big Apple for a probing, fun conversation at Manhattan’s storied P&T Knitwear bookstore with New York Times Magazine editorial director Bill Wasik, author of “And Then There’s This” and co-author of “Rabid” and “Our Kindred Creatures.” This event’s location has special poignancy for me, as
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Thursday, August 14, at 7:00pm, we’ll be discussing the graphic novel at the legendary Politics & Prose bookstore at 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, DC, with the spellbinding journalist and public-radio producer Alix Spiegel of This American Life and Invisibilia fame. More events coming soon.
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When composing the book’s big fold-out spread showing the landmark Paris exhibition opening, I wanted something bizarre, with the people in a monster-mouth-like interior. Famous dadaists, surrealists, actors, actresses, and others are in the crowd, with a bunch of Maria’s portraits scattered around the walls. Don’t art openings feel like a mouth to y’all, or
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When I first started researching Częstochowa, where Maria spent most of her childhood, I didn’t realize how much I already knew about this small Polish city. For decades, my grandmother Lola Lackman had told me about her birthplace, which she pronounced, “CHANCE-lick-off,” but I didn’t know this was Częstochowa until one day, deep into the
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I wish I could have spent a year just digging into the contradictory history of the Polish village of Kolno, but since Maria spent such a short time here, and as an infant no less, I couldn’t justify that kind of investment. I relied instead on the deep researches of Nathan Apkon at Jewishgen.org, sometimes
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Once armed with Maria’s real last name, Gelenievicz, I dove headlong into two archives rich in Polish Jewish genealogical information, Crarg.org and Jewishgen.org. These sites allow you to search phonetically, which proved useful because Maria’s family’s records spelled their surname Jeleniewicz. Here I discovered Maria’s actual birthdate. As expected, the day matched up: June 24.