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Susan Vreeland's current novel, The Passion of Artemisia, [ISBN 0142001821] illuminates the inner life of Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian Baroque painter, the first woman to make an independent living solely with her brush. Girl in Hyacinth Blue, [ISBN 014029628X] Book Sense Book of the Year Finalist of 1999, traces an alleged Vermeer painting in reverse chronology through the centuries revealing its influence on those who possessed it. Produced by Hallmark Hall of Fame under the title Brush with Fate. Vreeland's website is:http://www.svreeland.com.
The Passion of Artemisia
Recently rediscovered by art historians, and one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era, Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Susan Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist. Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples, inhabited by historical characters such as Galileo and Cosimo de' Medici II, and filled with rich details about life as a seventeenth-century painter, Vreeland creates an inspiring story about one woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile career and family, passion and genius.
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Susan Vreeland's Summer Reading List
The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh
by Vincent van Gogh
What sincerity and soulfulness this man had. What appreciation for the look of something simple. What depths of desire. One cannot read this and think of color or sunflowers or a human face in the same way afterwards. Though I'm reading the full three volume edition of 1800 pages published by Bullfinch for research for an upcoming novel of my own, there are shorter versions of selected letters. By the way, 2003 is the 150th anniversary of van Gogh's birth. If there ever was a time to read this...
Malinche's Children
by Daniel Houston-Davila
I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of this book, and know that I'm going to succumb to a joyous second reading. Houston-Davila has deftly woven a century of vivid Mexican-American lives into a tapestry that blends sweetness and anger, hope and disillusionment in the fragile microcosm of the L.A. barrio of Carmelas. His people, knowingly rendered by one who shares their heart, are passionately Mexican yet yearning for the kind of acceptance and breadth of experience common to any immigrant group in the United States. Their moving stories pulse with raw and tender life. In this Cannery Row of a neighborhood, Senor Trujillo, the wise teacher, says, "We are Malinche's children...Like her we are invisible to those who use us unless we find a voice--as she did--big enough for the world to hear." In writing colored with a musical blending of Spanish and English, and spinning out sensuous images and as many varieties of love as there are people in Carmelas, Daniel Houston-Davila gives us such a voice.
I Am Madame X
by Gioia Diliberto
John Singer Sargent's provocative portrait of Virginie Gautreau, called Madame X, has always intrigued me, enough that at one time I was considering writing about it myself but wasn't quick enough. Now I'll luxuriate in what Diliberto has done with the story, and indulge myself in a life of excess in belle epoque Paris.
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
It's wonderful when an author takes you to a time and place you thought you had no interest in, and then traps you into caring. I'm looking forward to that happening as the Belgian congo of 1959 unfolds before me in four voices, a writer's feat I want to learn how to do. From that first dark, gripping paragraph describing a forest, I think I'll be hooked.
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
Yes, it's true. Here's another contemporary classic I haven't read yet. I'm told that despite gnawing poverty, there is humor in McCourt's memoir. I want to see how he pulls that off.
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