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Toni Bentley, a dancer for George Balanchine, the greatest ballet maker of the 20th century, tells the story of At age seventeen, Toni Bentley was chosen by Balanchine, then in his final years, to join the New York City Ballet. From both backstage and onstage, she carries us through the serendipitous history and physical intricacies and demands of Bentley takes us inside the rarefied, intense, and thrilling world Balanchine created through his lifelong devotion to celebrating and expanding female beauty and strength--a world that, inevitably, passed upon his death. An intimate elegy to grace and loss and to the imprint of a towering artist and his transcendent creation on Bentley’s own life,
About the author
Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five New York Times Notable Books, including Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, Holding On to the Air (coauthored with Suzanne Farrell), and The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. Bentley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Best American Essays as well as in many periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, The Daily Beast, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
