Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death

• Zoe Anderson Norris is an inspiration for anyone today fighting for social justice and combating xenophobia, hoping to understand the long history and dangers of demonizing immigrants.

Contributor: Eve M. Kahn Eve M. Kahn, an independent scholar, is a regular contributor to The New York Times and author of the award-winning monograph Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907.

Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death is not just a book. It is a beautiful archaeological container built up from thousands of small shards, carefully glued back together—albeit with missing pieces—to form a whole: a gruff, loving, prickly, devoted, angry, beleaguered vessel known as Zoe Anderson Norris. --- Incredibly well researched and extremely enjoyable. Kahn is a wonderful storyteller, whose narrative highlights the beauty and humor of Zoe’s prose.---Jennifer Putzi, William & Mary, editor of The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition --- What a phenomenal subject is Norris, who turned every inch of her life experience—from Confederate Kentucky to New York’s Lower East Side—into fiction and reporting of irrepressible verve, variety, and truth. Worming her way into sites the press would rather forget, she gave voice to generations of struggling and striving New Yorkers and exposed miserly charities after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. In Eve Kahn, Norris has a biographer worthy of her own virtuosity, an exacting, exuberant storyteller who gives Norris and old New York breath again.---Christine Cipriani, biographer of Ada Louise Huxtable (forthcoming, W. W. Norton) and coauthor of Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape, winner of the Historic New England Book Prize --- A daring story told with exceptional verve. Zoe Anderson Norris wielded her pen as a trumpet on behalf of the underclasses. Eve Kahn wields her pen as a violin, playing an expansive song of this too-long-forgotten woman, a writer whose unbridled, fiercely principled life is exactly right for our moment.---Amy Reading, author of The World She Edited, Katharine S. White at The New Yorker --- Eve Kahn, a researcher of extraordinary tenacity, follows every lead to uncover the picaresque and forgotten life of Zoe Anderson Norris—a fiercely vocal, wildly uninhibited writer whose searing predictions and fearless protests against injustice have, until now, been lost to history. We owe Kahn a profound debt for restoring a voice that challenges long-held assumptions about gender roles at the turn of the 20th century. In riveting detail after riveting detail, Kahn reveals a character who demands to be known. How many other courageous women like Norris defied misogyny and dared to live boldly?---Marcia Ely, Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History --- This deeply researched and beautifully illustrated biography brings a fascinating, complex figure back to life. Kahn’s nuanced page-turner does justice to Zoe Norris’s devotion to underdogs and her struggle for independence against constant social pressures. Kahn’s passion for this untold story (a passion which mirrors her subject’s) energizes every page of this vivid, empathic biography. Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death is both a compelling read and a gripping work of feminist recuperation.---Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford --- Zoe Anderson Norris's indelible writings in defense of newly arrived immigrants, as brilliantly interpreted by Eve M. Kahn, have grown ever more relevant in this current period of great instability.---Allison Gilbert, co-author of Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman, winner of the Northern California Book Award --- Zoe wonderful! Queen of Bohemia is not just a woman writer writing about another woman writer, but a force of nature writing about another force of nature. Eve Kahn has gone down every conceivable rabbit hole to produce an astonishing and inspirational resurrection of Zoe Anderson Norris, one of the most captivating, empathetic, and prolific journalists of her era. I fell in love with Zoe after reading the magazine she produced. Lost no more, Zoe can now take her well-deserved and long overdue place in American literary history—Fanny Wright, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nellie Bly and Gloria Steinem, all rolled into one.---Steven Lomazow, M.D, co-curator/co-editor Magazines and the American Experience