Metropolitan Stories
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories.” —Maira Kalman, artist and bestselling author of The Principles of Uncertainty
From a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, an enchanting novel that shows us the Met that the public doesn't see.
Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts.
A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coulson's sly, whimsical debut takes the form of a collection of connected stories set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grounded in the author's decades of experience working at the Met, the surreal stories scamper among multiple points of view, both human and other. Ghosts appear, and pieces of furniture and paintings express their opinions. In "Musing," the museum's ambitious director seeks a Muse to take to a meeting, auditioning candidates from the Greek and Roman galleries as well as more recently painted Muses, all of whom banter among themselves about him and the auditioning process. In "Big-Boned," an "underdrawing," concealed for centuries by the paint of a finished work, slips out to work in the staff cafeteria. "Adam" and "Night Moves" both regard the tumble and fall of a statue, from the views of the statue itself, yearning to wiggle, and the guard who leaves his post by the statue to do the push-ups that he hopes will make him look more manly. The Met that emerges from these stories is both grandiose and cheerfully mundane, a place so packed with wonders that no one person can know them all. Those who think they know the place will be beguiled by the look behind the scenes; those unfamiliar with it will be prompted to make its acquaintance.
