Cohen’s Book Named a National Book Critics Circle Finalist

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) named Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen’s book, All We Know: Three Lives, a “2012 Finalist” in the biography category. Founded in 1974 in New York City, the NBCC is the sole award bestowed by working critics and book-review editors.

A finalists’ reading will be held at 6 p.m. on Feb. 27 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium. Winners of the National Book Critics Circle book awards will be announced on Feb. 28.

In All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Cohen revives the forgotten lives of three women. Esther Murphy, an heiress whose conversation was renowned for its brilliance; Madge Garland, a pioneering fashion editor; and Mercedes de Acosta, a collector and “quintessential fan,” had much in common: as lesbians and as women perceived to be failures. Cohen’s work rescues their reputations and confronts the reader with a fundamental question of biography: whose lives do we choose to remember, and why?