World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant retrospective, the resurrected images unleash a flood of suppressed memories—of her extraordinary life, her celebrated subjects, and the dark, painful secret at the core of her existence. Theroux's "superbly crafted, elegantly controlled novel" (Washington Post Book Review) "Vibrant and compelling...Paul Theroux at his satirical best." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review "Profound and effective, not to mention entertaining.. . . For all the peculiar brilliance of its surface, Picture Palace is a novel whose depths you can drown in.. . . Absolutely brilliant." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Dazzling. . . audacious. . . altogether captivating." —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Author
Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travelogue writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew.
