Picasso's Lovers by Jeanne Mackin

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You know Pablo Picasso. Now meet the women behind the masterpieces. The women of Picasso's life are glamorous and elusive, existing in the shadow of his fame - until, in the 1950's, aspiring journalist Alana Olsen determines to bring one into the light and discovers a past complicated by secrets and intrique.

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Gazes from Pablo Picasso are like brushstrokes. Some are long, lingering, full of texture and pigment. Some are short, shallow, even accidental. His gaze on me now falls somewhere between the two.

Once, his gaze would have found enough for an entire painting. He would have seen flesh, and the bone and muscle under the flesh, the question or certainty of the eyes. He would have seen past, present, and future and painted them in a way that made time irrelevant.

Yes, that was how he pained me. Everything and at once, all the angles and geometry of the body, and he made of me something eternal and always beautiful. That is what an artists can do for a woman. When most men looked at me, all I saw in their faces was desire, the urge to possess. When Pablo looked at me, his face filled with wonder waiting to be translated to lines and brushstrokes.

Spring. The second year of the Great War. I wasn’t twenty yet, and had returned from cold, starving Moscow, where a loaf of bread coast as much as a silk dress…Back to Paris for me!

When Pablo first saw me, I was sitting on the rim of the Wallace Fountain in Place Emile, face turned up to the sun like a basking cat, enjoying the fine day and wondering what adventure I might find…It was early summer. I had stolen a bunch of cherries at Les Halles and a roll, but my stomach rattled.

About the Author:

Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels, including The Last Collection, which has been translated into five languages, and The Beautiful American, which won a CNY award for fiction. She has taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at Goddard College and won journalism awards, and is currently at work on her next novel.

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A Lady of Good Family by Jeanne Mackin - Spotlight and Giveaway

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Jeanne will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

Raised among wealth and privilege during America's fabled Gilded Age, a niece of famous novelist Edith Wharton and a friend to literary great Henry James, Beatrix Farrand is expected to marry, and to marry well. But as a young woman traveling through Europe, she already knows that gardens are her true passion. How she becomes a woman for whom work and love, the earthly and the mysterious, are held in delicate balance is the story of her unique determination to create beauty while remaining true to herself.

Enjoy an excerpt:

1920
Lenox, Massachusetts

My grandparents had a farm outside of Schenectady, and every Sunday my father, who worked in town, would hitch the swayback mare to the buggy and take us out there. I would be left in play in the field as my father and grandfather sat on the porch and drank tea and Grandma cooked. My mother, always dressed a little too extravagantly, shelled the peas.

A yellow barn stood tall and broad against a cornflower blue sky. A row of red hollyhocks in front of the barn stretched to the sky, each flower on the stem as silky and round as the skirt on Thumbelina’s ball gown. In the field next to the barn, daisies danced in the breeze. My namesake flower.

I saw it still, the yellows and red and blues glowing against my closed eyelids. The field was my first garden and I was absolutely happy in it. We usually are, in the gardens of our childhood.

When I opened my eyes I was on a porch in Lenox, a little tired from weeks of travel, a little restless. My companions were restless, too, weary of trying to make polite conversation as strangers do.

It was a late-summer evening, too warm, with a disquieting breeze stirring the treetops as if a giant ghostly hand ruffled them. Through the open window a piano player was tinkling his way through Irving Berlin as young people danced and flirted. In the road that silvered past the inn, young men, those who had made it home from the war, drove up and down in their shiny black Model T’s.

It was a night for thinking of love and loss, first gardens, first kisses.

Mrs. Avery suggested we try the Ouija board. Since the war it had become a national obsession.

“Let’s,” I agreed eagerly.

About the Author:

Jeanne Mackin‘s latest novel, A Lady of Good Family, explores the secret life of gilded age Beatrix Jones Farrand, niece of Edith Wharton and the first woman professional landscape design in America. Her previous novel, The Beautiful American, based on the life of model turned war correspondent and photographer, Lee Miller won the CNY 2015 prize for fiction. She has published in American Letters and Commentary and SNReview and other publications and is the author of the Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. She lives with her husband, Steve Poleskie, in Ithaca. A Lady of Good Family is available at Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, and other bookstores.

Website: www.jeannemackin.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeannemackin1
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JeanneMackinAuthor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/36613.Jeanne_MacKin

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The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin - Excerpt Tour and Giveaway

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Beautiful American as part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Jeanne will be awarding a photo/postcard collection from the 1920s (US/Canada only) to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

As recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed.

Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920's Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee's magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will their reunion give them a chance to forgive past betrayals...and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?

Enjoy this exclusive excerpt:

Note de Tête

Top note: the fragrance first released when the perfume achieves initial contact with the skin of the wearer, predominating in the olfactory sense for approximately fifteen minutes. Quite often these first notes of fragrance remind the wearer of a certain day in childhood, the smell of a chamomile lawn or a spice cake, or a sunny day at a picnic spot. The top note is the first station on the journey, where the decision of yes or no must be made.

--From the notebook of N. Tours

In the kingdom of smells, everything is either bliss or torture.

-Colette

Chapter One

"You!" she said, and a few of her top parcels fell, as if in emphasis. The old doorman saluted and bent to retrieve them. Lee straightened her hat with a preoccupied gesture. She wore an expensive suit, well cut of real Scottish tweed, but it had seen better days. "I haven't seen you since..." She paused, thinking.

"Paris. Nineteen thirty-two," I supplied.

"Yes. Paris." Her face softened. With the help of the doorman, she balanced her packages in a way that allowed her to extend her gloved hand.

Lee shook hands like a man, with a strong grip and a pumping action. You had to stand your ground or her handshake could knock you off balance.

"You are dressing much better," she said. "I like the jacket. Good lines."

It was one of Dahlia's jackets, made for her by Omar's housekeeper. Omar was my dear friend in Grasse but I didn't say that, because then I would have to talk about Dahlia and explain who Omar was and it would be difficult to end all the explanations. Sixteen years is a long time, even longer when a war stalks through them. Sixteen years could not be condensed to casual chitchat in the doorway of Harrods. "I like your suit," I said, settling for the predictable.

"I still feel more comfortable in trousers and combat boots." Lee hesitated, considering. Perhaps she was pursuing phantoms as well.

About the Author:

Jeanne Mackin is the author of several novels: The Sweet By and By (St. Martin’s Press), Dreams of Empire (Kensington Books), The Queen’s War (St. Martin’s Press), and The Frenchwoman (St. Martin’s Press). She has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in several journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She is also the author of the Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers (Cornell University publications) and co-editor of The Norton Book of Love (W.W. Norton), and wrote art columns for newspapers as well as feature articles for several arts magazines. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, in Washington, D.C. She teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont, has taught or conducted workshops in Pennsylvania, Hawaii and New York and has traveled extensively in Europe. She lives with her husband, Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York. Website: http://www.jeannemackin.com/

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