As thrilling as Agent Josephine and A Woman of No Importance, the propulsive untold story of a trailblazing female New Yorker reporter in France on the eve of WWII who begins sounding the alarm as a German serial killer stalks the Parisian streets, from award-winning author Mark Braude. In 1922, Janet Flanner arrived in Paris with dreams of writing about “Beauty with a capital B” for The New Yorker. Then a niche publication, her employer was self-consciously apolitical, seeking only breezy reports on French art and culture. As signs of frightening extremism, economic turmoil, and widespread discontent became apparent, Flanner ignored her editor’s directives, reinventing herself, her assignment, and The New Yorker in the process. Working tirelessly to alert American readers to the dangers of German’s chancellor and the worrying developments across the Atlantic, Flanner soon became enmeshed in the disturbing criminal case of a man who embodied all of the darkness she was being forced to confront. The child of two proud Nazis, Eugen Weidmann’s crimes were explicitly political and for Flanner, who covered Weidmann’s crimes, capture, and trial, the case served as a guiding metaphor through which to understand the tumultuous years through which she’d just passed and to prepare herself for the dangers to come. Set against the epic backdrop of pre-WWII Europe, THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE tracks how Weidmann’s case and the political turmoil of the period transformed Flanner from naïve writer to the hard-hitting journalist who exposed Americans to the warning signs of WWII.
Author
MARK BRAUDE is a cultural historian and the author of KIKI MAN RAY: ART, LOVE, AND RIVALRY IN 1920S PARIS (W.W. Norton, Summer 2022), THE INVISIBLE EMPEROR: NAPOLEON ON ELBA FROM EXILE TO ESCAPE (Penguin Press, 2018), and MAKING MONTE CARLO: A HISTORY OF SPECULATION AND SPECTACLE (Simon & Schuster, 2016). His books have been translated into several languages. Mark was a 2020 visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris and was named a 2017 NEH Public Scholar. He is the recipient of grants from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the de Groot Foundation, and others. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and a lecturer in Stanford’s departments of Art History, French, and History. Mark was born in Vancouver and went to college at the University of British Columbia. He received an MA from NYU’s Institute of French Studies and a PhD in History and Visual Studies from USC. He has written for The Globe and Mail, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and others. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and their two daughters.
