AuthorsLive: Michelle Young Uncovers The Art Spy and the Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland

AuthorsLive welcomes author and journalist Michelle Young to discuss The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, her riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II that uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the world’s most treasured masterpieces.

Michelle will be joined in conversation by Suzanne Nelson, award-winning author of dozens of middle grade novels, and her new gripping adult debut, The Librarians of Lisbon, which follows two best friends working as librarians and covert agents in neutral Portugal during World War II.

On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance?

Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, mostly been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft.

Copies of The Art Spy and The Librarians of Lisbon will be available for purchase and signing with thanks to Diane’s Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Young is an award-winning journalist, author, and professor whose writing on looted and lost art has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Forward, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is a graduate of Harvard College in the History of Art and Architecture and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is a professor of architecture. She is also a scholar in the New York Public Library’s Allen Room and the founder of the publication Untapped New York. Michelle appears regularly in documentaries by Netflix, National Geographic, The History Channel, Smithsonian, PBS and more, and her work has been published additionally in Narratively, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Curbed, and Metropolis Magazine. She divides her time between New York City and Paris.