VIVIENNE
A Novel
Emmalea Russo
A Novel
Emmalea Russo
Publisher: ARCADE PUBLISHING an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing
www.arcadepub.com
Release Date:
September 10, 2024
About the Book:
Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang?
This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortly after Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaughter Vesta Furio, her much younger boyfriend—a garbageman named Lou—and Franz, the family dog. Their quiet lives are disrupted when Vivienne’s work is selected for inclusion in a high-profile retrospective called "Forgotten Women Surrealists" at the prestigious NAT Museum. However, when rumors of her past misdeeds begin to circulate and she is dropped from the show, a gallery curator enters the picture hoping to capitalize on the buzz generated by the controversy, sending the family's tensions, hopes, and dreams to a dizzying peak.
Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?
About the Author:
Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Praise for Vivienne:
“In an instant, one of our finest poets has become one of our finest novelists. Emmalea Russo is—as Leonard Cohen sang—‘All dressed to kill, in rags of light.’” —Bruce Wagner, bestselling author of Dead Stars, Chrysanthemum Palace, and ROAR
“A combustible alchemy of rare beauty and force. Russo’s lyrical prose crackles with vitality, and her story about an artist’s response to philistine attacks against her body of work is a triumph of literary courage and innovation." —Bernard Schweizer, author of Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism
Praise for Emmalea Russo:
“It has a messy epicurean sensibility which should appeal to art terrorists and ad hoc gangsters. A street credibility. It is my favorite volume of poetry written in the last however many years. . .” —Manuel Marrero on Confetti
“Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a ‘Nervous disorder’ . . . Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness.” —Publishers Weekly on G
“Moving seamlessly from the finely researched to the experiential, Wave Archive is precisely that, an accumulation of wave upon wave of Emmalea Russo’s thinking, being and responding through her researches upon and experiences around epilepsy.” —Rob McLennan on Wave Archive
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