Rare Nest is delighted to present a new novel by Gallery friend Robert Archambeau. We’ve read the galleys of Alice B. Toklas is Missing and can report that this is a fascinating, intense and deep dive into the art world of 1920’s Paris - with connections to Chicago’s North Shore. Please join us as we celebrate with the author. Advance copies will be available or preorder from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

ALICE B. TOKLAS IS MISSING is a novel of comic suspense set among the artists, writers and musicians of Jazz Age Paris.

When aspiring painter Ida Caine’s wanna-be writer husband Teddy drags her to Gertrude Stein’s famous artistic salon in Paris, she finds herself exiled to a corner with the wives of swaggering male geniuses. Will this be her fate? Before Ida can summon the courage to prove herself as an artist, she stumbles onto a plot to kidnap Gertrude Stein’s romantic partner, Alice B. Toklas.

Soon after Alice disappears, Teddy vanishes as well, and Ida is drawn into a world of subterfuge, jealous artists, and outsized literary egos. Surrealism, a young T.S. Eliot, and a journey through the eerie catacombs of Paris lead Ida to the discovery of an avant-garde plot to destroy the Louvre and all the art within it.

 Aided by a cast of sharply-drawn historical figures, Ida must foil the plot, and discover whether Teddy really is the man she thought he was. The action comes to a head at the premiere of Ballet Mécanique, a concert of modern music where rival factions of artists and writers battle in the aisles.

 Alice B. Toklas is Missing combines the American-in-Paris Jazz Age milieu of Midnight in Paris with the satiric bite of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and takes us on one woman’s voyage to discover art, love, and her own hidden courage and talent.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Archambeau is the author of two books each of poetry, literary essays, and academic scholarship. He has worked as a professional art critic, and his work has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry, Boston Review, and many other venues, and he has received awards and grants from the Swedish Academy, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Academy of American Poets. He chairs the English department at Lake Forest College, keeps adding to his burgeoning art collection, and will soon complete a sequel to Alice B. Toklas is Missing set in the London of Virginia Woolf and her peers, The Bloomsbury Forgery.

WORDS, ASSEMBLED: Poetry with Ruth Danon / Natania Rosenfeld  

Reception, Reading, Discussion in conjunction with “ASSEMBLY HALL: FEDERLE / UPCHURCH”
Saturday, June 1st, 7 – 9 PM

Reservations required: keith@rarenestgallery.com or 708-616-8671

Poetry and visual art have been engaged in a very long conversation. Natania Rosenfeld and Ruth Danon entered the conversation in different but complementary ways. Rosenfeld looks directly at art works. Inspired by them she renders both the essence of their visual qualities and her response to them in vividly descriptive poems and essays. Danon abstracts from the visual to build structures for her poems and prose poems. Drawing on architecture, she explores subjects as though entering poems as rooms, inviting the reader-audience to enter with her. These poets will present their work and engage each other and the audience in a conversation about these and other ways of thinking about the sister arts.

Ruth Danon is the author of Word Has it (Nirala, 2018), Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVOX 2016) and much earlier Triangulation From a Known Point. Her poetry and prose have been published widely in the United States and abroad. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, and Resist Much, Obey Little. After over 20 years of directing and teaching the Creative Writing Program for adult undergraduates at New York University she retired in 2016. She now teaches in New York City, and Beacon, NY and curates the Spring Street Reading Series for Atlas Studios.

Natania Rosenfeld is a writer and independent scholar and Professor Emerita of English at Knox College. She has published a poetry collection, Wild Domestic (Sheep Meadow Press 2015), and a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton 2000). An e-chapbook, She and I, appeared in 2018 from Essay Press. Her essays, poems and fiction have published in journals including The Yale Review, APR, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review, and four essays have been listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays collections. She lives in Edgewater with her husband and two quadrupeds.

Image: Rebekka Federle - Baloonaxe

Dear Bob, Dear Betty: Love and Marriage During the Great Depression with Elizabeth Catherine Wright and Timothy K. Wright

Space is limited, and reservations are required.  keith@rarenestgallery.com or 708-616-8671

Join Rare Nest Gallery as we host brother and sister Elizabeth and Timothy Wright in reading letters written by their parents Robert Llewellyn Wright and Elizabeth Bryan Kehler.

In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, two young people meet and fall in love. Llewellyn Wright (Bob), Frank Lloyd Wright's youngest child, whose adolescence was marked by the public scandals surrounding his father's private life, is struggling to begin a private law practice in Chicago. Elizabeth Kehler (Betty), daughter of a Chicago artist who abandoned the family when she was still in the womb, is working as an intake counselor at the Milwaukee Vocational School. Their fervent correspondence over a 10-month courtship period is witty, sassy and poignant, as they grapple with their passionate feelings and try to create a financially stable marriage in the midst of the 20th century's most serious economic crisis.

The couple's daughter, a scholar of French literature, has written an Introduction telling their story before and after the courtship. 35 illustrations, extensive footnotes and an Index illuminate the family and social history behind the letters.

View a great video about Dear Bob: Dear Betty on Youtube

Images:  Book Cover courtesy Elizabeth Wright