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.

Published by Other Press, October 8, 2019. Audiobook narrated by Jill Eikenberry. Cover design: John Gall Design. Cover image: Samuel F. B. Morse, Susan Walker Morse (The Muse), ca. 1836-37, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Herbert L. Pratt, 1945.