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Jill’s Year In Books

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Mary Morris

229 books | 1,095 friends

Rachel

1,272 books | 108 friends

Naori

3,614 books | 738 friends

Sabra

1 book | 214 friends

Andrew Gifford

380 books | 1,346 friends

Cathy Smith

1,245 books | 221 friends

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121 books | 86 friends

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234 books | 20 friends

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Jill Koenigsdorf

Goodreads Author

Born

in Kansas City, Missouri, The United States

February 11

Website

http://jillkoenigsdorf.blogspot.com

Genre

Fiction, Art, Historical Fiction

Influences

The Lost Generation, all my teachers, The International Library of Poe ...more

Member Since

March 2012

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JILL KOENIGSDORF

PHOEBE AND THE GHOST OF CHAGALL: "Marc Chagall joins forces with Phoebe in the South of France to retrieve a special missing painting that rightfully belongs to her, encountering helpful witches, evil art collectors, and uncovering a black market art ring along the way."

ABOUT THE BOOK: Phoebe is an artist who is making very little money designing wine labels for a winery in Sonoma. Her house is in foreclosure, she's divorced, turning forty, and beleaguered on every front. Enter Marc Chagall, visible only to her, who appears in her life to help her retrieve one of his own paintings that her father found during the liberation of France and that was meant for Phoebe and her mother, but never made it into their hands. In this d JILL KOENIGSDORF

PHOEBE AND THE GHOST OF CHAGALL: "Marc Chagall joins forces with Phoebe in the South of France to retrieve a special missing painting that rightfully belongs to her, encountering helpful witches, evil art collectors, and uncovering a black market art ring along the way."

ABOUT THE BOOK: Phoebe is an artist who is making very little money designing wine labels for a winery in Sonoma. Her house is in foreclosure, she's divorced, turning forty, and beleaguered on every front. Enter Marc Chagall, visible only to her, who appears in her life to help her retrieve one of his own paintings that her father found during the liberation of France and that was meant for Phoebe and her mother, but never made it into their hands. In this debut comic novel, their hunt for this painting takes them to the South of France, where, with the aid of a cast of characters that includes: two sisters who are witches, a San Francisco Art dealer, and a misguided French innkeeper, also leads Chagall to a few out of the hundred paintings that went missing during his lifetime. The Good Guys, in this case the ones who appreciate art for its beauty rather than its dollar value, must prevail over louche black market art dealers, evil collectors, and the German pawn who is hired to deliver the goods.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jill Koenigsdorf began writing at the age of ten and has never looked back. Her story Browsers and Grazers was published in the Chautauqua Review and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and others have been published in ZYZZYVA, Tin House, The Southwest Review, and American Short Fiction. Her non-fiction pieces have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Sunset Magazine, The New Mexican, and New Mexico Magazine. She has received the McGinnis Award and a Peregrine Prize.

FROM THE AUTHOR: Phoebe and the Ghost of Chagall took form in that pinball arcade of the mind where all unborn novels hang out, where ideas ricochet and the good ones light up all the winning lights and set off the sirens. The first ball that slammed around was this wonderful notion that in lean times, struggling artists in Paris used to pay for their meals with art. I started wondering what happened to all those placemats that Picasso adorned with a Minotaur, or that little oil painting that Chagall handed over to pay for his cassoulet. Then of course I became increasingly obsessed with Chagall himself, a man who lived through two wars and was always one step ahead of serious trouble, due first to his being a Russian, and next to his being a Jew. I read a fascinating tidbit that 100 of Chagall's paintings went missing after World War I and were not retrieved during his lifetime. So for the next three years, I was pumping quarters into only one pinball machine and it was called: Where does missing art go and who gets to own it?

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Average rating: 3.94 · 47 ratings · 17 reviews · 3 distinct works

	Phoebe and the Ghost of Chagall 3.94 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 2012 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	ArrowHeart Volume 1 (The ArrowHeart Volumes) by Dylan Ritch, Cat Halvorson, Rachel Hutzenbiler 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Zyzzyva Volume VIII, Number 4: Winter 1992 (Zyzzyva #32) by Kathryn Trueblood (Goodreads Author), Heiner Muller, Gerald Vizenor 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

40 posts
Jill Koenigsdorf's Blog

Late Spring The bliss of quiet today,a strange absence ...

Late Spring

The bliss of quiet today,

a strange absence of motors,

of any man-made sounds.

certainly not silence.

This haven has its own

ambience-

the chortle of willful squirrels,

the piccolo explorations

of hatchlings.

& under the pomegranate tree,

each red flower trembles,

reverberating

with the hum

of laboring bees.

Spring is shorter now,

warm enough for the wine-colored sweet peas

to blossom, to st

Jill is Currently Reading

Jill Koenigsdorf is currently reading

The Infamous Gilberts

by Angela Tomaski

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Apr 19, 2026 02:16PM

Jill Koenigsdorf is currently reading

Kin

by Tayari Jones (Goodreads Author)

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Mar 25, 2026 10:33PM

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Jill Koenigsdorf entered a giveaway Land by Maggie O'Farrell (Goodreads Author) 5 copies available, ends on May 19, 2026 Enter to win »
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Quotes by Jill Koenigsdorf (?)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870”
― Jill Koenigsdorf

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Jill’s Quotes

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”
― Frank O'Hara

39 likes

“This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

tags: belief, faith, inspiration

356 likes

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Jill’s Year In Books

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Jill’s Friends (51)

Jill Koenigsdorf

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