CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/31/2016

Halloween Reading: The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic

Publisher's Weekly calls it "the strangest book of 2016... seductive and confounding." Huffington Post calls it an "enchanting and repulsive book." Tatler calls it a "fabulous book… a mesmerizing marriage of art and science." And Lenny Letter writes, "from beginning to end, the beauty of this book and the brilliance of its author will leave you in awe." Joanna Ebenstein's lushly illustrated, elaborate and beautiful historical study of dissectible female wax dolls "digs deep into the fascinating story behind this beautiful oddity," as Kim Kelly writes in Salon, "and lays it all bare in tight, engaging prose that spans centuries and takes us from the artisan workshops and cathedrals of 18th century Italy into the dusty dime museums of turn-of-the-century New York and deep into the uncanny valley inhabited by sex dolls and surrealism in search of an answer: Who was the Anatomical Venus?" Pictured here: a life-sized, 40-piece Anatomical Venus from the collection of nineteenth-century self-styled doctor, Pierre Spitzner, in dissected state. You can't do better for Halloween reading.