Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War - Hardcover

by Florian Illies (Author), Simon Pare (Translator)

"An enthralling and insightful cultural history--one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair." --Malcolm Forbes, Washington Post Book Review

An ingeniously orchestrated popular history brings to life the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century

As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife's bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight--or fight--as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.

Author Biography

Florian Illies is a writer, editor, and art historian and the author of five international bestsellers, including 1913: The Year before the Storm. He lives in Berlin.

Simon Pare is a translator from French and German who lives near Zurich. His translation of The Flying Mountain by Christoph Ransmayr made the Man Booker International Prize longlist in 2018, and he was part of the team that translated The Panama Papers into English.