https://www.alexislandau.com/villaaurora daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://www.alexislandau.com/contact daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://www.alexislandau.com/the-mother-of-all-things daily 1.0 2023-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f8c53639b552e56c85ae52d/958635ac-9a3a-4799-b157-48efb649969d/Screenshot+2023-12-02+at+5.31.07%E2%80%AFAM.png The Mother of All Things - Kept busy by her life as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. But while enduring the burden of solo parenting on her hus­band’s summer film shoot in Bulgaria, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything. Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact Greco-Roman female rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating where it intersects with her own story. By exploring the eternal stages of woman-hood across time, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief. https://www.alexislandau.com/about daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f8c53639b552e56c85ae52d/1603196209776-KDXS5UHEFEVR2THMRHE7/DanielSahlberg%C2%A9AlexisB1421.jpg About - Alexis Landau studied at Vassar College and received an MFA from Emerson College, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Those Who Are Saved, The Empire of the Senses, and The Mother of All Things. She lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles. https://www.alexislandau.com/events daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://www.alexislandau.com/the-empire-of-the-senses daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f8c53639b552e56c85ae52d/1603031914777-92V5E0VSNGVSQ76QKC1F/Empire+of+the+Senses.jpg The Empire Of The Senses - Lev Perlmutter, an assimilated, cultured German Jew, enlists to fight in World War I, leaving behind his gentile wife, Josephine, and their children, Franz and Vicki. Moving between Lev’s and Josephine’s points of view, the first part of the novel focuses on Lev’s experiences on the Eastern Front—both in war and in love—which render his life at home a pale aftermath by comparison. The second part of the novel takes us to Berlin, 1927–28. Now young adults, the Perlmutter children grapple with their own questions: Franz, drawn into the Nazi brown shirt movement, struggles with his unexpressed homosexuality; Vicki, seduced by the Jazz Age and everything new, bobs her hair and falls in love with a young man who wants to take her to Palestine. Unlike many historical novels of its kind, The Empire of the Senses is not about the Holocaust but about the juxtaposition of events that led to it, and about why it was unimaginable to ordinary people like Lev and his wife. Plotted with meticulous precision and populated with characters who feel and dream to the fullest, it holds us rapt as the tides of cultural loss and ethnic hatred come to coexist with those of love, passion, and the power of the human spirit. https://www.alexislandau.com/those-who-are-saved daily 0.75 2023-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f8c53639b552e56c85ae52d/a9496f80-2bae-434d-975b-81c4f943de45/ThoseWhoAreSaved_final.jpg