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2.5 

The Weeping Woman

By Zoé Valdés & David Frye
The Weeping Woman by Zoé Valdés & David Frye digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Winner of the prestigious Azorín Prize for Fiction, the best-selling novel about love, sacrifice, and Picasso's mistress, Dora Maar.

A writer resembling Zoé Valdés—a Cuban exile living in Paris with her husband and young daughter—is preparing a novel on the life of Dora Maar, one of the most promising artists in the Surrealist movement until she met Pablo Picasso. The middle-aged Picasso was already the god of the art world's avant-garde. Dora became his lover, muse, and ultimately, his victim. She became The Weeping Woman captured in his famous portrait, the mistress he betrayed with other mistress-muses, and their affair ended with her commitment to an asylum at the hands of Picasso's friends.

The writer's research centers on a mysterious trip to Venice that Dora took fifteen years later, in the company of two young gay men who were admirers of Picasso, including the biographer James Lord. After this episode, Dora cut off contact with the world and secluded herself in her Paris apartment until her death. "After Picasso, God," she would say. What happened in Venice? The more the writer investigates, the more she finds herself implicated in a story of passion taken to the extremes. In The Weeping Woman, prize-winning novelist Zoé Valdés narrates the journey of a woman who would do anything and everything for love.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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The Weeping Woman Reviews

2.5
“I picked this book up because I thought the story of real life Picasso muse, Dora Maar, who shut herself away from the world after a five (or eight) day trip to Venice with two of his admirers sounded interesting. Boy was I wrong. The writing is so overly flowery and descriptive it had me yawning at chapter 2. The skipping back and forth between the modern writer's view and Dora's was not well done. It was sometimes hard to tell who was writing which chapter. I got so bored that by page 75 I knew it was going back to the library, and it did.”

About Zoé Valdés

Zoé Valdés was born in Cuba in 1959 and has lived in exile in France since 1995. Once dubbed "the Madonna of Cuban literature," she is the acclaimed author of several novels, including Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada and I Gave You All I Had, both published by Arcade. Besides being awarded the 2013 Azorín Prize for The Weeping Woman, she has won the Planeta Prize and the Premio de Novela Ciudad de Torrevieja. She received the Tres Llaves (Three Keys) to the city of Miami in 2001. She lives in Paris.

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