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Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Business
- Yahoo
A Colorless 35-Carat Diamond Ring—Part of a Collection One Couple Accumulated Over 60 Years of Marriage—Could Sell for $3 Million at Auction
One couple's private collection of jewelry, which was accumulated over the course of their six decades of marriage, will be auctioned off at Sotheby's later this month, on June 13, 2025. Among the 13 pieces on the auction block will be a rare, colorless 35-carat diamond ring from Graff, a New York City jeweler. It is expected to sell for anywhere from $2 to $3 million. The couple, Jack and Louisa, started accumulating jewelry after Jack promised his new bride that she would "have ten times as many jewels" as the women they saw on their stories are documented in many different ways—for some couples, a lifetime together might be seen through photographs; for others, the years and memories shared might be outlined in love letters and notes; for others still, a happy marriage can be documented through physical objects. For Jack and Louisa, a couple married for over 60 years, the latter is true. Over the course of their union, Jack treated his wife to countless pieces of beautiful jewelry, a response to a promise he made on their honeymoon that she would "have ten times as many jewels" as the women around them someday. Now, those stunning items—including a rare diamond ring—will be auctioned off at Sotheby's later this month. Dubbed 'Joie de Vivrea: Journey in Jewels," the couple's personal collection of 13 pieces will be sold at auction as part of Sotheby's New York City's High Jewelry auction on June 13, Forbes notes. Among the offerings is a 35-carat colorless Graff diamond ring, which is estimated to sell for $3 million. "The jewels in the collection, selected entirely by Jack, represent years of mutual adoration. They also reflect Louisa's stately bearing, informed in part by years of studying dance, which allows her to wear dramatic pieces with effortless grace," Sotheby's says in the auction statement. Related: A Rare 17-Carat Harry Winston Diamond Ring Is Expected to Sell for Up to $1 Million at an Auction Funnily enough, Louisa notes that she never particularly cared about acquiring lots of jewelry. 'I aspire to cashmere sweaters, not jewels,' she told Sotheby's. 'I've never entered a jewelry store. But Jack? He just goes for a walk and comes back with something tucked inside his coat pocket.' One of these trips resulted in her husband coming home with a massive emerald-cut diamond ring from Graff, which features D color and VVS2 clarity—in short, it's a near flawless stone. 'I had never seen anything so big and so perfect,' Louisa told Sotheby's. 'I didn't feel I could wear it. We were about to head to Capri, so I put it in the vault. As the days passed, the diamond grew bigger and bigger in my mind until it was the size of a table. When we returned home, I went to the vault to get the ring…and the diamond had shrunk! And so, I wore it.' The statement-making sparkler would undoubtably make for an incredible engagement ring, assuming the price tag is within your budget. The couple will also auction off a number of other pieces from their collection, including earrings and bracelets. Up Next: A Rare 10-Carat Pink Diamond With Ties to Marie Antoinette Is Going Up for Auction Next Month—Will Someone Use It as an Engagement Ring? Read the original article on Brides
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Her Korean father disappeared on vacation. Now Louisa is stuck in L.A.
While genre fiction steadily advances onto bestseller lists, realism soldiers on, amid cyborgs and dragons and boozy detectives. Innovative novels from Ann Patchett and Claire Lombardo are rooted in ordinary lives, magic tricks kept to a minimum. Now the formally restless Susan Choi turns to social realism in her beguiling if baggy 'Flashlight,' mapping a family's journey among political autocracy and personal pain, from Midwestern cornfields to the Pacific Rim. Seok 'Serk' Kang, a taciturn professor at a Michigan university, accepts a year's appointment at a college in a Japanese town close to Osaka in 1978. He's accompanied by his white wife, Anne, and their adored 9-year-old, Louisa. Serk contains multitudes: the eldest son of a Korean couple displaced by war, he was raised in Japan, where he was known as Hiroshi. He'd distanced himself from his parents' communist sympathies, disapproving of their repatriation to North Korea, opting instead for an academic career in the U.S. He's betwixt and between, a country of one. It's a fraught moment for a move: stagflation stalks the globe; the marriage flounders; Anne's health flags (eventually leading to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis), and the precocious Louisa asks probing questions. There's also Tobias, Anne's son from a youthful fling, for whom she'd waived legal claims after his birth; he's caught wind of the family's plans and lives nearby, a 19-year-old vagabond eager to connect with his biological mother. The year abroad is a kind of homecoming for Serk, yet it's cut short one August evening as father and daughter stroll across a beach while on vacation. He's carrying a flashlight when he vanishes; his body is never found. Louisa is discovered face-down amid the shoreline's foam, almost drowned. This mystery kicks off 'Flashlight,' propelling the plot forward, backward and sideways. With Franzen-esque fastidiousness, Choi unpacks each character's backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Émile Zola. Her period details are spot on, candy for those of us who were children during the Carter presidency: hot plates, instant coffee, accordion files, 'Smokey and the Bandit.' (I was hoping for a Sleestak cameo — if you know, you know.) Choi weaves long, sinuous sentences, teasing out the aftermath of Serk's presumed death. His wife and daughter's troubled relationship is the novel's pole star: 'Flashlight' is less about the absent Serk than the omnipresent, annoying Anne. Settled in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood, invalid parent and rebellious child clash: Anne 'never so much as misted an eye when Louisa could see,' Choi writes. 'She was aware that Louisa regarded her as an unfeeling person, a sort of robot whose heart — if she even had one — must be made of the same dull aluminum, cold to the touch, as those hideous crutches all but fused to her arms.' Louisa heads east to an elite university (a thinly disguised Yale), putting a continent between her and her mother. The book's middle section is bulky with their dramas, which Choi approaches like a documentarian. She wants to get their story right, even if she risks a narrative doldrum. A European sequence drags on and on, overstaying its welcome, but it also underscores Louisa's divided self as well as Choi's deep ambivalence about status and privilege. The Ivy student finds herself friendless and franc-less in Paris, boarding a cheap bus to London: 'Beyond the station was a wide black trench of oily water that was somehow the Seine. It seemed to Louisa that there were two Parises, the famous and beautiful one to which Christiane held the keys, and the other, where the cigarette butts and empty eau gazeuse bottles and people like Louisa belonged.' Choi flirts with the conventions of political thriller, too, recalling the shadowy resistance groups in Ed Park's prize-winning 'Same Bed Different Dreams.' Chapter by chapter, 'Flashlight' inches back to its opening, scattering clues to the puzzle of Serk's disappearance. Is it random tragedy or something more? A stray orange cat; a séance in a hostel; a 'nearsighted galoot' who decodes cryptic messages from Radio Pyongyang; flashlights that aren't just flashlights — these bread crumbs guide us to the novel's denouement. Her prose occasionally shades purple: 'Not her fault, then, if her nerves could be considered not-her,' Anne reflects on her disease, 'and what else could they be, those shredded nebulae whose feeble glow reached Anne's imagination across light-years of the void of her ailing insides?' The author could have trimmed rhetorical flourishes and excessive explication, shaved off a few adjectives and adverbs; yet the power of 'Flashlight' derives from its exacting psychological portraits, Choi's reconnaissance through the tradition of social realism, the rich tension between her natural cynicism and a desire for empathy. As in Park's Pynchon-style satire and Angie Kim's affecting 'Happiness Falls,' 'Flashlight' explores the collective experiences of Korean Americans, agonies closeted away, the rage that screams inside. The term generational trauma may seem abstract to some, a cliché to others, but Choi makes it concrete, like Louisa's red backpack or Serk's electric torch. She brings her impressive literary toolbox to bear here, and the novel ranks among her best work, alongside 'American Woman' and the National Book Award laureate 'Trust Exercise.' Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, 'This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.' He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
A Novel Highlights a Dark Korean History and a Shattered Family's
FLASHLIGHT, by Susan Choi Friends are God's apology, it's said, for relations. In Susan Choi's ambitious new novel, 'Flashlight,' we're dropped into a shattered Korean American family, and friends are few and far between. This is a novel about exile in its multiple forms, and it reads like a history of loneliness. Nearly every person has the detachment of a survivor. A similar detachment — a narrative austerity that is one of Choi's hallmarks — is present in the book itself, for good and sometimes ill. This novel begins, as do Francoise Sagan's 'Bonjour Tristesse' and Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' on a beach. A father and his young daughter are out for a walk in the gloaming. He carries a flashlight. When they fail to return, search parties form. The girl is later found in the tide margin, hypothermic, barely alive, with little memory of what occurred. Her father, who can't swim, is gone — apparently drowned and carried out to sea. The girl's name is Louisa. She's 10 and precocious. Her father, an academic, is named Serk. That's what he goes by in America, at any rate. His impoverished Korean parents had named him Seok, and when he went with them as a child to Japan during World War II, so that they could find work, he was known in school as Hiroshi. He was a striver, and he loved being Hiroshi. 'Flashlight' spans decades, and four generations of Serk's family. The novel's abiding theme may be what one character wonders early on: if 'supernatural vengeance exists, for the person who tries to renounce his birthplace.' Serk's painfully split identities reflect the contested politics of the postwar era, with America and the Soviet Union (as well as Japan and China) jostling for advantage on the Korean Peninsula. Many writers are only partially conscious of the meanings in their work. Choi has set out to shine a flashlight, if you will, on a series of historical wrongs, the worst of them committed by North Korea. By the end of this novel, the author's research into these machinations, and some of their brutal human ramifications, including re-education camps, nearly swamps the book — the narrative begins to feel like reportage, like didactic historical exposé. It's hard to talk about the plot, and the resonances, of 'Flashlight' without dropping spoilers like a trail of seeds. But I will try to avoid them, out of deference to the reader but also to Choi, a major world writer who deserves the chance to reveal her cards slowly. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
10 books to read in June
Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your June reading list. Reading is a versatile summer activity: A book can educate you, entertain you and occasionally even do both of those things. Our selections this month include literary fiction about a parent's blurry past, Manhattan diaries from the Reagan era and a politically relevant road-trip novel. All of those and more promise to float your boat — or should we say your beach tote? Happy reading! Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins ReidBallantine: 352 pages, $30(June 3) It's the 1980s and astrophysicist Joan Goodwin is part of a coed NASA group training as astronauts — a process defined by fierce competition and persistent sexism. The narrative moves between Joan's ascent through the ranks, including a love story as explosive as a rocket launch, and a mid-decade disaster reminiscent of the Challenger tragedy. Space nerds and romance fans alike will love it. Flashlight: A Novel By Susan ChoiFarrar, Straus & Giroux: 464 pages, $30(June 3) Choi's new book began as a 2020 New Yorker story. Louisa's father Serk is Korean, while mother Anne hails from Ohio. Louisa was just 10 when, in the book's harrowing first chapter, Serk disappears. Unable to connect with Anne, even years later when the latter has developed multiple sclerosis, Louisa is challenging and compelling, much like this thoughtful book about families. The Slip: A Novel By Lucas SchaeferSimon & Schuster: 496 pages, $30(June 3) Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, emerges as a vibrant crossroads where people of every age, race and gender meet. When Massachusetts teenager Nathan Rothstein, spending the summer with relatives, disappears, the diverse voices of his fellow gym members — immigrants, an unhoused man, a Playboy bunny-turned-beautician — add depth and intrigue, building toward a wildly original and unexpected conclusion. So Far Gone: A Novel By Jess WalterHarper: 272 pages, $30(June 10) Walter ('Beautiful Ruins') matches cadence to drama, channeling the unhinged narration of Rhys Kinnick, an environmental journalist whose anger over the planet's decline sparks a family rift and his retreat to a remote cabin. One morning, Rhys finds his grandchildren left on his doorstep. From there, the plot hurtles forward: kidnappings, frantic road trips, a festival rave and high-stakes showdowns. Wild as things get, humor and heart remain. Ecstasy: A Novel By Ivy PochodaPutnam: 224 pages, $28(June 17) Pochoda offers a twisty, modern take on Euripides, set at a luxurious 21st-century Greek resort. King Pentheus becomes Stavros, a wealthy, controlling figure married for decades to Hedy, Lena's best friend. When Hedy invites Lena to the resort's opening, the pair discover an all-female group of bacchanalians dancing and drumming on the beach. They join in, losing touch with their unresolved, everyday problems — and that's how tragedy unfolds. The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex By Melissa FebosKnopf: 288 pages, $29(June 3) Febos responds to the question 'What do women want?' with conviction: Women, like everyone else, want pleasure. When she turned 35 and ended a relationship, Febos eschewed her familiar, fall-back comforts of sexual intimacy and instead embraced solitude and celibacy. She discovered that other forms of pleasure — intellectual, sensual and spiritual — were just as meaningful to her as romantic or sexual experiences. How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir By Molly Jong-FastViking: 256 pages, $28(June 3) In 2023, Erica Jong's 'Fear of Flying' turned 50. The same year, Jong was diagnosed with dementia, and her daughter turned into her caregiver. Jong-Fast, an acclaimed journalist, was also faced with her husband's cancer diagnosis and her stepfather's worsening Parkinson's disease. In the tradition of the finest memoir writing, the author spares no one, herself least of all, as she untangles the bad from the good while still allowing for some tricky knots. I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir By Hala AlyanAvid Reader Press: 272 pages, $29(June 3) An award-winning Palestinian American writer tackles subjects including home, displacement and gestation in this lyrical memoir that explores the trauma of fractured identity. When Alyan ('Salt Houses') finally becomes pregnant via surrogate, after experiencing five miscarriages, she tries to forge a sense of motherhood as her husband leaves to 'clear his head.' The memoir's shifting timeline mirrors the author's own sense of destabilization. The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler's All-Female Concentration Camp By Lynne OlsonRandom House: 384 pages, $35(June 3) Olson's latest centers on four members of the French Resistance — Germaine Tillion, Anise Girard, Geneviève de Gaulle (niece of Charles de Gaulle) and Jacqueline d'Alincourt — all imprisoned in Germany during World War II. Their deep friendship, a source of emotional sustenance, helped them defy the enemy and document atrocities. All survived, forging a sisterhood that endured and resulted in lifelong activism. The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 By Thomas MallonKnopf: 592 pages, $40(June 3) Mallon, a distinguished man of letters, moved to Manhattan at 32, holding a PhD from Harvard and a dissertation that became his acclaimed 1984 book, 'A Book of One's Own.' Mallon was openly gay and his diaries capture the atmosphere of a city and community reeling from the AIDS crisis amid the material optimism of Reagan-era America. His writing stands out for its honesty and authenticity, offering a vivid, personal chronicle of a transformative era.
Winnipeg Free Press
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Depth of perspective
Tomorrow — it's a simple enough word meaning the day after today, at some future time. Unless you're one of a group of young teenagers, saying goodnight to each other as they head home to lives ranging from sadness to violent assault. Then, the word tomorrow is a symbol of hope, an affirmation from each one that they will be there the next day, that they will support each other and fill the day with the friendship, love and trust that they so desperately need. Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman's My Friends alternates between two time periods. The first is the summer before four friends turn 15; it's the last time they enjoy spending sunny days swimming off a pier, and one of them goes on to paint a picture of that idyllic time that makes him a world-famous artist. The second is 25 years later, when a troubled 18-year-old named Louisa comes into possession of the painting, which she has loved for years, and the friendship of one of the four, and embarks on an unusual cross-country trip back to the small town where it all started. Morgan Norman photo Fredrik Backman has a knack for warm-hearted but heartbreaking stories. Louisa fell in love with the painting The One of the Sea — depicting the sky, the pier and three teenagers in the water — when she was six or seven and living in one of her foster homes; she took a postcard version off the fridge door and carried it with her ever after. It means everything to her, 'a sort of happiness so overwhelming it's almost unbearable,' Backman writes. When she learns the painting will be on display at an art auction, she sneaks in to see the real thing and becomes angry at the rich art collectors and their misunderstanding of the painting, 'Because it isn't a painting of the sea. Only a damn adult would think that.' Louisa recognizes it as a painting of laughter, love and hope, the ephemeral qualities that made it and the painter famous. Backman enjoys a few sly digs at the so-called art lovers, such as how the old-money people don't like the new-money people: 'The only things that should be new are sports cars and hip joints.' Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The alternating chapters build on each other as the story unfolds in two sets of real time: the four teenagers' summer and the genesis of the painting, and the recollections of Ted, one of the four, as he recounts the story a quarter-century later under questioning by Louisa. Backman's 2012 debut novel A Man Called Ove spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned two movie versions. His subsequent books such as Beartown, Us Against You and Anxious People confirm his role as a writer with a knack for tales that are warm-hearted and heartbreaking, with characters you can't help but root for (often against what seem to be insurmountable odds) and for a sly humour (even if it does sometimes include farting). My Friends A powerful storyteller, Backman has done it again, creating a tale of messy life that balances loss and grief with joy and hope, and especially the power of friendship, that tugs at your emotions and, somehow, makes sense despite it all. The tale's many twists and turns are worth the trip; suffice to say the painting is lost, recovered and… well, why spoil it? Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.
