Check out 17 prints from famed fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, who died just last month, at Books & Books Miami Beach. Now through June 1.Bassman won acclaim in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast black-and-white portraits of models that had a dreamy quality. In the 1990s, she rediscovered a stash of lost negatives and emerged as a fine-art photographer.A new book of her work Lillian Bassman: Lingerie has just been published. As Ginia Bellafante put it in the New York Times recently, “In place of heavyset women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality.” Fifty years later, these images have lost none of their allure, and the enormous cultural impact of the TV show Mad Men has given them new currency.  1. It’s a Cinch, model: Carmen, Merry Widow by Warner’s, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman  2. Southwest Passage—Sunset Pink, pajamas by Kickernick, 1951, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman   3. The Line Lengthens, lingerie by Lily of France, 1955, for Harper’s Bazaar, © Lillian Bassman     4. Silo, Bra and Panties, 1948 (advertisement for Firestone Contro elastic yarn), © Lillian Bassman   

History of a Pleasure Seeker is a brilliantly written portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love. It is a book that will beguile and transport you—to another world, another time, another state of being.The novel opens in Amsterdam at the turn of the last century. It moves to New York at the time of the 1907 financial crisis and proceeds onboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town. It is about a young man—Piet Barol—with an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Piet’s father is an austere administrator at Holland’s oldest university. His mother, a singing teacher, has died—but not before giving him a thorough grounding in the arts of charm. Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe’s leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets—and soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him.