(Photo © Sigrid Estrada.)
Carole DeSanti, a WNBA-NYC member and a panelist on the upcoming Historical Fiction Panel, is Vice President, Editor at Large at Viking Penguin. She is known for championing original voices in women’s fiction, including Dorothy Allison, Melissa Bank, Terry McMillan, Ruth Ozeki, Marisha Pessl and Deborah Harkness. Her debut novel, The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R., was published in March 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It has been described as “an unflinching portrait of love and loss against a landscape of Parisian decadence,” and “magnificent in scope and achievement.”
Ms. DeSanti wrote a piece for the March 30th issue of Shelf Awareness, in which she describes some of the research she did for her novel. An excerpt of her piece is below.
Pesky Distinctions
By Carole DeSanti
“Strauss-Kahn Charged in French Prostitution Probe” read a recent headline, marking a new stage in the months-long investigation into organized sex parties in Paris, Vienna and Washington, D.C. allegedly involving French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer Henri Leclerc caused a stir late last year by stating, “People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude.”
This has long been a dilemma, I found, while researching The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. However, during France’s Second Empire, under the Regulation System, the problem was much more easily resolved…
To see the full piece, visit Shelf Awareness here.
