Book

Delayed rays of a star : a novel

Lee, Amanda Koe, 1987- author

Overview

\"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, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous--then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysée, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday
• Subject: Dietrich, Marlene Fiction. / Wong, Anna May, 1905-1961 Fiction. / Riefenstahl, Leni Fiction. / FICTION / Literary. / FICTION / Biographical. / FICTION / Contemporary Women.
• ISBN: 9780385544344

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PR9570.S53 L393 2019	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE