Carmen Portnoy discusses and reads from her new book The Women of Solemnity

THE WOMEN OF SOLEMNITY, set in the 1990’s, in Los Angeles, Paris, Ibiza and New York, displays Carmen’s incomparable wit and perception as she explores the souls of seventeen women in this astonishing collection of short stories.

MESMERIZING characters like Maria di Magenti, the last daughter of the house of Solemnity, whose skin smells like frangipani and hearts of palm. Darsala Murex, the infamous nude of ‘Woman of the Flowers.” Frieda, a true white-blond Norwegian, who thought she could find and also lose herself by living in Paris. Lily, an exquisite model who had made a million dollars by sixteen and at twenty, had written her epitaph: “All she wanted was to waste into air, without nightmares or staring eyes or tears. Now she is dead and happy, my dears.”