Lisa Cohen, author of All We Know: Three Lives, talks with New Yorker writer Hilton Als

Lisa Cohen’s debut work All We Know is a joint biography of three complicated, glamorous, and relatively unknown women from the early 20th century: Esther Murphy, a brilliant Manhattan intellectual who dazzled her friends with her conversation (Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them) but was never able to finish writing a book; Mercedes de Acosta, a poet and playwright known for her friendships and romances with celebrities like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Isadora Duncan, who amassed a huge collection of objects associated with them; and Madge Garland, an influential editor of British Vogue and friend to such modernists as Virginia Woolf and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and one of the most important thinkers and writers about twentieth century fashion and haute couture. The book was the subject of a rave New Yorkerreview by theater critic and author Hilton Als, who calls Cohen “a brilliant biographer, one who marries scholarship to literature in a totally unprecedented way.” Als and Cohen talk about the book and the modernist women who inhabit it at Greenlight.