Books
The Marchesa Casati
Portraits of a Muse
The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse is a visual biography, telling Casati's captivating life story alongside the art and designs she has inspired, featuring 200 images covering her lifetime and beyond. Personal family mementos, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, some never before seen, illustrate the artistic and cultural legacy she left behind. Runway images, sketches, and advertorials show her continuing impact on the present-day fashion community.
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Luisa Casati was one of the most notorious celebrities of the early 20th century and an inspiration for artists ranging from Man Ray to Jean Cocteau. Now the iconoclastic beauty is the subject of a new book by the Casati archivists Ryersson and Yaccarino. With more than 200 pictures, including private family photos, this visually lavish publication chronicles the rise and fall of a heroine who, despite her tragically destitute end, transformed herself into a work of art. It encapsulates the haunting legacy of an unmatched muse.
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–Canadian Art
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The Best Art Books of the Year Selection 2009
–The New Republic
Infinite Variety
The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati
For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. She was infamous for her evening strolls—naked beneath her furs, parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. Artists such as Man Ray and Augustus John painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers, including Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, and Jack Kerouac, praised her strange beauty; celebrities and royalty from around the world were amazed and awed by her lavish parties and spectacles at her homes in Italy and France. The extravagance ended in 1930 when Casati was more than twenty-five million dollars in debt, but she continued her iconoclastic and creative pursuits until her death in London in 1957. Her legacy continues, especially in contemporary fashion, with John Galliano, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld, and other designers inspired by her remarkable style. Fully authorized, completely updated, and richly illustrated, this is the fantastic story of the Marchesa Casati.
The Marchesa Luisa Casati wanted to be a living work of art...for the first three decades of the twentieth century, she succeeded.... A meticulously researched biography, Infinite Variety is as much art history as chronicle of personal obsession.
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– The New York Times
Ryersson and Yaccarino are judicious historians of frivolity who capture the tone of a life that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure.
– The New Yorker
The Princess of Wax
A Cruel Tale
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A wicked noblewoman presides over a decadent court of masked revelers. The most beautiful of waxen automatons is brought to life by a sorceress, her very heart hiding a deadly secret. And then love triumphs, if but for a single moment, before a sudden and terrifying finale. This is the bizarre world of The Princess of Wax. The book is illustrated by the lush and elegant art of Anne Bachelier.
In this Edgar Allan Poe-esque nightmare, Venice and La Casati have never been so enchanting and decadent. Anne Bachelier's illustrations, so surreal and so wonderfully rich in detail, are the perfect visualization of an intriguing, never-ending journey through eccentricity, obsession, love, cruelty, glamour and destiny.
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–Grazia D'Annunzio,
Special Projects Editor, Vogue Italia
An innovative, dark fairy tale.
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-Gallery Guide
Spectral Haunts and Phantom Lovers
A sinister Venetian mirror serves as a portal for its long-dead mistress, weeping skulls lock in a lipless kiss, a loyal canine follows his gentle owner beyond the grave—this is the otherworldly realm of Spectral Haunts and Phantom Lovers. Here you will find a collection of eight supernatural tales set amongst the small villages and market towns of 1920s England. Each of them shares a passion fervent enough to reach across the invisible barriers separating the living from the dead. You are cordially and cautiously invited to experience this funereal bouquet of ghostly encounters read by renowned actress Louise Jameson (Dr. Who, Tenko, EastEnders). This exclusive recording is graced with an original haunting theme by distinguished French film composer Philippe d'Aram (Les héroïnes du mal, Fascination, La morte vivante).
Poisoned Ivy
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Autumn 1916. Crale, the ambitious Senator’s son, Wynter, the talented artist and Marrok, the football prodigy. Their paths cross in strange and unexpected ways. Poisoned Ivy is full of haunting shadows and mysterious goings-on, set against the background of the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, its arcane secret societies, the college gridiron, and the artist’s canvas. Green-eyed jealousy, blue-eyed ice, and amber-eyed fire all combine to create a delicious and mischievous tale that will leave you wanting more.
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[Poisoned Ivy] is less than a hundred pages but it packs an interesting punch despite its brevity. It’s romantic but doesn’t veer into explicitly erotic territory, challenging your expectations. To be entirely truthful, I expected a quasi-romantic slice of e-book pulp, fraught with the moony, frustrated longings of Ivy League closet cases. However, what I got was a cracking good, albeit short, read whose suspense held my interest and whose characters intrigued me. Ryersson’s writing is evocative of the era, and his characters well-fleshed out.... Very classy.
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–Out in Print
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The Arsenic Flower
A British nobleman; a prominent lawyer; a renowned physician; and a famed judge of Her Majesty’s court—all marked for murder. But by whom, and why? The only clue is a mysterious green flower, which holds the secret to a diabolical plan of revenge; one whose thorny roots plunge deep into the long buried past. Its mastermind, an exquisite living corpse of a youth, in whose icy veins poison flows. Here is an erotic tale of a supernatural settling of scores, set in the absinthe-tinged hothouse era of late-Victorian decadence. One ripe with intrigue, suspense, and horror, interwoven with forbidden passions and unrequited desires that will stir the blood of any reader.
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It takes a very gifted and skillful writer to be able to create a story and mix it with historical, mythological, and literary references without being boring or overpowering. On the contrary this story is very craftily balanced. I was quite literally absorbed by the book and its very strange and very highly intoxicating atmosphere. I love this book for its unusual descriptions with words of a past long gone, I love its poesy, dark humor, and irony. The paranormal component is very elusive at first, a touch here and there. All these elements combined give this story its unique atmosphere and add such an incredible depth. Many clues are scattered but they really make sense only at the end, where everything is revealed and becomes clear.... This is the most extraordinary and insane tale about revenge I've ever read!
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–Booked Up Reviews
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Summer's Lease
Calcutta, West Bengal, May 1893—Mair Calloway, Major Willoughby’s grandson, is arriving at Barrackpore for one night, en route to England for his first year at university. Captain Charles Blackthorne has been ordered to meet Mair at the train and take him under his wing for twenty-four hours. “No girls!” the Major orders. “Take care of his every need—personally!” Blackthorne, with an impeccable record in twelve years of military service would seem to be the perfect chaperone…
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Scot D. Ryersson has to be some sort of magician with words at least. He was able to take me there with Charles and Mair and make me share what they were seeing, what they were hearing, and what they were feeling. I was there with them in my little time capsule, in India!... I was simply blown away by this story.
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–Black Tulip
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Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know
In the exotic, sun-drenched Mediterranean town of Taormina, a young Englishman scrutinizing sensual images of bronze-toned young men is enthralled by the photographic portrait of the nefarious nobleman, Count Eyolf d’Magnus-Eriksson. “Who is Eriksson…?” he innocently asks his host, eliciting an erotic tale of decadence and desolation set on the Isle of Capri, a “paradise of vices.” On the cliffs overlooking the crashing waves of the Tyrrhenian, Count Eriksson, an obscenely wealthy, hedonistic, and coldly beautiful young aristocrat builds a home in adulation to the Roman wolf god, Lupercus, where he fearlessly invites and willingly embraces the carnal beast, Lupo. Theirs is a forbidden union of volatile passions and destructive desires, a tale that arouses an exquisite flame in the blood of the young Englishman.
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Just be warned readers that once you've reached a certain point in this book, there will be no turning back from a deliciously intoxicating madness! Nobody will be able to save you, you'll be on your own ... with your mind.... I swear, if you read Scot D. Ryersson’s descriptions, it is like becoming high without even consuming a drop of wine or any kind of prohibited substance!
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–Goodreads
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