Can you please tell us about its inception, and then how you managed to bring it to fruition?Įllis Avery: I’m honored by your words, and grateful for them. Both as a book that goes deeply inside the life of a painter, and in literary terms, but also, and in particular, as a lesbian writer and painter. JEH: Ellis, I think you know what a big fan I am of your novel The Last Nude. People have compared Avery’s sentences to brush strokes and as a painter (and a once-teenaged painter’s model), I felt this acutely. Her writing style is sumptuous and supple.

It is a nuanced, complex book about Parisian politics in the Jazz Age, about painting, about love and queer power dynamics. It’s been my pleasure to receive such thoughtful, informative answers to my questions.Įllis Avery’s scintillating, gorgeously woven The Last Nude (Penguin, 2011) was written about art deco artist Tamara de Lempicka, a bisexual painter in Paris during the Jazz Age, from the point of view of her American muse, Rafaela. I want to thank Ellis Avery for her generous contribution to the interviews on this blog. She is also the author of the 9/11 memoir The Smoke Week and the recently arrived memoir-zine The Family Tooth. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and out of her home in the West Village. Her novels, The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012) and The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead 2006) have also received Lambda, Ohioana, and Golden Crown awards, and her work has been translated into six languages. The only writer ever to have received the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction twice, Ellis Avery is the author of two novels, a memoir, and a book of poetry. We will miss her and her contributions to literature, so much.

Today, on Feb 15, 2019, Ellis Avery died. This interview was first published in 2015.

The last nude by ellis avery