Delayed Rays of a Star
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A CrimeReads Historical Fiction Best Book of the Year
At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich; Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous — then, infamous.
The trajectories of these women’s lives wind from Weimar Berlin to LA’s Chinatown, from the Bavarian Alps to the Champs-Elysées, and the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, victim, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. In the orbit of each star live secondary players whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left behind.
Intimate and clear-eyed, this is a visceral depiction of womanhood — its particular hungers, its oblique calculations, and its eventual betrayals.
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Publishing has a diversity problem. There are less 'diverse' books being published which limits the discoverability and reach of those authors.
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