Skip to content

Muse

Muse

Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different
Click for full-size.

Muse

by Galassi, Jonathan

  • Used
  • Very Good
  • Hardcover
Condition
Very Good
ISBN 10
0385353340
ISBN 13
9780385353342
Seller
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 4 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Seattle, Washington, United States
2 Copies Available from This Seller
(You can add more at checkout.)
Item Price
£4.78
Or just £4.30 with a
Bibliophiles Club Membership
FREE Shipping to USA Standard delivery: 4 to 8 days
More Shipping Options

Payment Methods Accepted

  • Visa
  • Mastercard
  • American Express
  • Discover
  • PayPal

About This Item

Knopf Publishing Group, 2015. Hardcover. Very Good. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.

Reviews

On May 27 2015, CloggieDownunder said:
“It was not where or who you came from but what you did with your own grab bag of advantages and disadvantages that made you remarkable. He’d learned early on in his work that the real writers hadn’t gone to Yale or Oxford; they came from everywhere - or nowhere – and their determination to dig down, to matter, whatever the odds against them, was the only key to their succeeding”

Muse is the first novel by American poet, translator and publisher of iconic Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jonathan Galassi. The only literature-appreciating member of his decidedly non-literary family, a teen-aged Paul Dukach takes refuge in Pages, the local bookstore. When proprietress, Morgan Dickerman introduces him to the poetry of Ida Perkins, it is the beginning of a life-long passion. He devours her work and becomes a fanatical expert on all there is to know about this elusive woman who was”… literally enamored with art – arguably less so with the individuals who created it, who often turned out to have inconvenient needs and egos of their own, which on occasion dwarfed even hers”

On graduation from college, Paul eventually finds employment with independent publisher, Purcell and Stern, learning a great deal from his boss, the brash but knowledgeable Homer Stern: “Sexual activity for Homer was an index of moral fallibility and vitality at one and the same time. It didn’t matter what people did; he was sure they did something illicit. It meant they were alive, like him. Maybe he was simply looking for companionship in transgression”. Paul also gets to know Stern’s arch-rival, Sterling Wainwright, Ida’s second cousin and publisher of all her works.

On the way home from a European book fair (“Frankfurt [Book Fair] was anything but social; it was carnivorousness at its most rapacious, with a genteel European veneer. The dressy clothes, the parties, the cigars, the jacked-up prices in the hotels and restaurants, the disappointing food were all of a piece. It was exhausting and repetitive and depressing – and no one in publishing with any sense or style would have missed it for the world”), Paul finally gets the opportunity to meet his idol, now reclusive for many years in Venice.

He finds that Venice “… wasn’t dead at all. Venice was a Platonic beehive buzzing with covert vitality. Its fabulous gilt-encrusted past wasn’t the point; it was how the past kept gnawing away at the present, digesting and fermenting and reforming it, and extruding it into the future”. And for some reason, Ida takes him into her confidence, entrusting him with an explosive secret. “Ida had surely been no saint…Ida had been guileless and wilful, passionate and snobbish, generous, great-hearted, self-seeking, myopic, petty” This he knew, but now he faces a dilemma.

Galassi’s extensive experience in both the publishing industry and as a poet are apparent on every page. He peoples his novel with a cast of highly believable authors, editors and publishers that, no doubt, bear more than a passing resemblance to figures in the actual literary industry. Of his publishers, he says: “Their authors and their work had been the ultimate raison d’etre for whatever they themselves had done. Beyond their petty self-aggrandizing, Homer and Sterling and their kind had been true to their writers’ gifts. …Their authors were their gods…”. He completes the effect with a bibliography of Ida’s works and books about her. This is a quite debut novel, one that will have a broad appeal, but in particular to those involved in the industry. Outstanding.

(Log in or Create an Account first!)

You’re rating the book as a work, not the seller or the specific copy you purchased!

Details

Bookseller
ThriftBooks US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
G0385353340I4N10
Title
Muse
Author
Galassi, Jonathan
Format/Binding
Hardcover
Book Condition
Used - Very Good
Quantity Available
2
ISBN 10
0385353340
ISBN 13
9780385353342
Publisher
Knopf Publishing Group
Place of Publication
New York
Date Published
2015

Terms of Sale

ThriftBooks

30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.

About the Seller

ThriftBooks

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 4 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2018
Seattle, Washington

About ThriftBooks

From the largest selection of used titles, we put quality, affordable books into the hands of readers

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Jacket
Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
tracking-