Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781982614782

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories. We are swept away in the museum. Beauty abounds. Yearning too. The art literally comes to life. And it makes perfect sense."" -- ""Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty"" ""Written with elegance, wit, and a flair for comic genius, Metropolitan Stories describes the museum world as it is and as it strives to be. Coulson is a brilliant narrator of the fantastical and the all-too-plausible excesses of curators and museum directors. Her infectious sense of fun, her steady flow of insights into the human heart and its foibles, her wanton but beady-eyed attention to blind ambition, her passion for art itself, and most of all her deep sense of human character make this not only a delightful book, but also a deeply rewarding one. It marks the emergence of a major new talent."" -- ""Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon"""

Author Information

Christine Coulson began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department. She returned in 1994, and over the next twenty-five years, rose through the ranks of the Museum, working in the development office, the director's office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. She recently left the Met to write full-time.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available