Year: 2021

Lily (from the The Widower’s Notebook)

For NATIONAL CAT DAY I could not think of anything better than posting this drawing I made of my last cat, Lily, along with this excerpt about her from my memoir THE WIDOWER’S NOTEBOOK (Penguin Books). It’s a bit long but… Beside Joy’s main closet is a tall stack of shelves where her sweaters and tees are neatly stacked. I kept this door closed, but every morning it was open. For a while I thought the magnets that held the door in place must have weakened, or it was some weird settling of the building, though I couldn’t remember it ever happening before. Every night I closed it. Every morning it was open. It started to feel eerie. Then, one morning, still in bed, I saw the door bang open, and Joy’s cat, Lily, jumped out. When I investigated, I saw that she had made a sort of nest on one of the shelves among … Read more

NY Journal of Books

“As Luke [the protagonist] dives farther into his ancestor’s mind, we dive with him, hoping to exonerate the simple crook while admiring his bravado. We also take pause to consider complex questions about the value of art for the individual as well as for society.” In 1911, a Louvre worker took the Mona Lisa off the wall and absconded with it. Vincenzo Perrone kept the painting for more than two years. After returning to Italy, he contacted authorities, claiming he had committed an act of nationalism by bringing the painting back to the home of its creator, Leonardo da Vinci. These facts are documented in multiple sources, including the 2012 Joe Medeiros film The Missing Piece: Mona Lisa, Her Thief, The True Story. Writer and artist Jonathan Santlofer uses this robbery as the backdrop for his new novel. He creates a fictional grandson protagonist, Luke Perrone, and sends him on a quest to find the … Read more

Meeting Mama Cass

Got out my pencils to sketch Cass Elliot on her birthday. Below, something I wrote when I was just out of graduate school, living in Brooklyn (before it was fashionable), and heard that Cass Elliot had died. I remember feeling as if one my friends had died, utterly absurd as I didn’t really know her, but the memory of the two or three hours we’d spent together remained strong. I remembered her deep throaty laugh and how she cried for a moment and how young and stupid I was, and to this day feel a mix of excitement and sadness when I hear one of her songs. Meeting Mama Cass I used to say I’d become an artist so I could listen to music all day, and I did. Unlike today, when just about everyone gets their music on demand through Spotify or iTunes or Sirius, back then music came in the form of a … Read more

Shelf Awareness for Readers

Into the pantheon of great art heist stories leaps The Last Mona Lisa, Jonathan Santlofer’s novel of intrigue, romance and murder. Its set in Florence, Paris and New York and centered on a cast of art scholars, forgers and–those most nefarious of public servants–librarians. One day, New Yorker Luke Perrone receives a curious e-mail from Italy: before his “sudden death,” a professor requested that Luke be contacted about a recent discovery–“what may have been your great-grandfather’s journal,” which is now at Florence’s Laurentian Library. Luke, a painter and assistant art professor, has spent two decades researching Vincent Peruggia, “my family’s most infamous criminal,” the man behind the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Luke is only too happy to cross the pond and hunker down at the library, unaware that at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, a criminal intelligence analyst has him under communication surveillance Read more here at Shelf Awareness…  

The Today Show – Best Thrillers of 2021

Huge thank you to Harlan Coban and the Today Show for choosing “The Last Mona Lisa” for BEST READS! “Santlofer uses the real-life robbery and creates a really compelling story that takes place in 1911 and the present-day – fans of Dan Brown and Steve Berry will love it!” – Harlan Coben