Muse
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Muse is a love letter to the heroic days when books were ink-and-paper, publishers were outsize, outrageous personalities, and authors were gods and goddesses. Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright are two old-school New York publishing grandees, professional enemies and life-long rivals over the work—and affection—of the beautiful and elusive Ida Perkins, one of America’s great poets. When a young editor who works for Homer gets hold of Ida’s last manuscript, mayhem ensues.
Publishing veteran Jonathan Galassi's elegy for a disappearing era in our culture is hilarious, wise and deeply affecting, a thought-provoking meditation on love and work that reverberates in many directions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In poet Galassi's first novel, a book editor navigates the world of 21st-century publishing while unraveling the secrets of his lifelong hero, an octogenarian poet named Ida Perkins. The novel opens during the postwar literary boom, when nemeses Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright launch competing houses P&S and Impetus, respectively. The protagonist, Paul Dukach, begins working at P&S in the '90s, when Union Square is still "the city's major needle park." The bulk of the story, though, transpires in the aughts, when Paul, driven by his obsession with Ida, befriends Homer's foe, Sterling, a cousin of the poet. When Sterling gives Paul the cryptic notebooks of Ida's late love to decode, the project becomes an occasion for a meeting with Ida. This meeting reveals her final, secret collection the contents of which, Paul realizes, have the potential to turn publishing upside-down. The fun of this book is watching Galassi, who serves as president and publisher of FSG, weave his fictional characters into real literary history and put his considerable gifts as a poet to good use. Indeed, Perkins' verses ("she smells the ozone" / "after love the fear") surpass Galassi's expositions on publishing and its ongoing war against Big Tech.
