Two things:
1. The editor of THE EXILE tells me that the book has been on the NYT Bestseller list for seven weeks so far. This is Very Cool Indeed, and thank you very much!
2. As a secondary thank you [g], here is a link to the original French painting that supplied the model (literally) for page 5. (It took a -lot- of hunting to find the right butt, believe me. I kept sending the illustrator, Hoang, links to Rober Mapplethorpe sites and the like, but Random House’s porn filters wouldn’t let Betsy, the editor, look at them.)
I would post the image itself, but am really not sure about the copyright of an image of a painting held by a museum–I mean, the museum certainly owns the painting, but not sure about the image. Don’t want to infringe inadvertently, though–and the web page has some interesting information about the painting, anyway.
(No, if you want to see Page 5, you’ll have to borrow somebody’s copy, or sneak into the graphic novels section at Barnes and Noble.)