Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel

Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel

Lara Vapnyar, author of the prizewinning story collection There Are Jews in My House, brings us a poignant and comic first novel about a delightfully sincere modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a typical Russian girl, living with her bookish professor mother in a drab Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and settles on her lifeâ€™s calling: she will be the companion to a great writer. Her memoirs tell of her immigration to New York after college, the stifling expectations of her Brighton Beach cousins, and the crucial moment in a bookshop on the Upper West Side, where Tanya attends a reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist.

Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing and a little less time at the gym, the shrink, and the literary soirees where she feels hopelessly unglamorous and out of place. But as she gradually learns to read Englishâ€”struggling to better understand Markâ€™s work and her true role as Museâ€”Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself.

Animated by Vapnyarâ€™s beguiling grace and vividnessâ€”with a narrative richness reflecting the great tradition of Russian realism to which she is a natural heirâ€”Memoirs of a Muse is an altogether wonderful novel. It is a lively meditation on female capabilities and happiness, on the mysteries of artistic inspiration (and the absurdities of artistic life), and, perhaps most movingly, on the pain and wonder of the immigrant experience in New York City.
Country USA
Manufacturer Pantheon
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2006-04-04
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780375422966

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Pantheon
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2006-04-04
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780375422966

Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel

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