Jacket design: ©John Gall Design.
Jacket 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

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

To purchase Metropolitan Stories: A Novel, click one of the links below: