Events for The Last Mona Lisa

Event Time Place Adriana Trigiani Facebook Live (virtual event) Tuesday, August 10, 2021 6:00 pm (ET) Adriana Trigiani Live link here Jonathan Santlofer in conversation with Joyce Carol Oates (virtual event) Wednesday, August 11, 2021 8:00 pm (ET) Harvard Bookstore / Politics & Prose / Books & Books link here Jonathan Santlofer Reading / Q&A (virtual event) Monday August 16, 2021 9:00 pm (ET) Poisoned Pen Scottsdale, AZ link here  Jonathan Santlofer in conversation with Joyce Carol Oates (virtual event) Tuesday, August 17, 2021 8:00 pm (ET) Little City Books Hoboken, NJ link here Jonathan Santlofer in conversation with Book Reporter’s Carol Fitzgerald (virtual event) Tuesday, August 17, 2021 1:00 pm (ET) Book Reporter (check back for link) Jonathan Santlofer in conversation with Hank Phillippi Ryan (virtual event) Tuesday, August 17, 2021 4:00 pm (ET) A Mighty Blaze link here Jonathan Santlofer Reading / Q&A (virtual event) Wednesday, August 25, 2021 7:00 pm (ET) Cuyahoga County … Read more

Publisher’s Weekly Review – The Last Mona Lisa

“The real-life theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre on Aug. 21, 1911, by workman Vincenzo Peruggia provides the backdrop for this outstanding caper from Nero Award winner Santlofer (Anatomy of Fear). In 2019, Luke Perrone, a nontenured university professor of art history and Vincenzo’s descendant, searches the Laurentian library in Florence, Italy, for his great-grandfather’s journal in the hope of determining whether the stolen Mona Lisa was replaced by a forgery before its recovery in 1913, and thus ensuring his academic position. John Washington Smith, an ambitious analyst from Interpol’s Art Theft Division, and the mysterious Alexandra Greene join Luke in his effort, and the trio are soon contending with nefarious scholars, forgers, stalkers, a Franciscan monk, and a Russian hit man as the bodies pile up. Details of Florence, Paris, and New York City enhance the twisty plot, as does the insider view of the underground world of art collectors … Read more

Kirkus Reviews – The Last Mona Lisa

      “Santlofer crafts a layered and absorbing art mystery, complete with exciting action scenes and beautiful descriptions of the city of Florence and its art as well as Paris and Nice. It’s the human story at the heart of it, though, that really elevates the novel.” Kirkus Reviews Read Here          

The Brooklyn Rail – The Last Mona Lisa

    I met Jonathan Santlofer at the Yaddo artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. We were housemates, and got on well. After we’d left, he offered me his spare bedroom in Manhattan, if I was ever passing through town. A few months later, returning home after a trip to Africa, I was doing just that. Poor Jonathan Santlofer! I had contracted malaria in Uganda. I’ll leave the rest of that story untold … by J.C. Hallman READ MORE HERE

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Author Interviews: Jonathan Santlofer

 Five years ago, author and artist Jonathan Santlofer was at home with his wife, food writer Joy Santlofer, when Joy began feeling feverish. Joy, who had undergone outpatient surgery the day before for a torn meniscus in her knee, called her doctor’s office and was told to come for her scheduled appointment four days later. That appointment never happened. “It’s hard for me to say what exactly happened,” Santlofer says. “I had walked out of the room briefly to go into the back of our loft, to my studio, and when I came back, it was not that much later, but my wife was in incredible distress.” Joy died suddenly — possibly from medications interacting badly — and Santlofer was left in what he calls a “fugue state” of grief. Though he continued living in the loft that they had shared, he initially put away all of the photographs of his wife, because they … Read more

When It Comes to Grief and Loss

Sometimes the thing you least want to do becomes the very thing that touches other people most. I never wanted to write The Widowers Notebook, a book that chronicles my wife, Joy’s sudden death. I resisted writing it, then resisted publishing it. I told myself it was too personal, too revealing, too painful. I worried until the day it was published. Then I started traveling around the country with the book, meeting people, hearing their stories, their need to tell them; men and women talking of grief and loss and, if not wanting answers at least acknowledgment that although they may never get over their loss they will get better. Messages from strangers flood my website and inbox every day telling me I have written their words, thanking me for having the courage to write them. I tell them it was not courage; it was simply the way I processed my grief. Everywhere I go … Read more

Pop Matters – Compassionately Explores How Men Are Allowed to Grieve

  It’s a tough balancing act when an artist enters the realm of grief, especially when it’s a true story. Suppose that the real lesson of life is that it’s a logically sequenced collection of losses: innocence, money, possessions, or (in the case of this book) partners we chose for our life who suddenly slip away by design or the random chaos of the universe. Is the fact that we choose to testify about our stories of loss the first step to irrelevancy? The question is not about “why” we are telling the story. That doesn’t need to be asked. The question should be who are we to tell the story and what new elements to the universal feeling will we add to the literature of grief? If our memoir won’t realistically detail and provide a new element to this narrative, how should it serve the reader? Christopher John Stevens Pop Matters Read More Here