Join us for a reading with author Martha Anne Toll, who will read from her recent novel, Three Muses. A conversation with author Jody Hobbs Hesler will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Three Muses ventures through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet.
John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. In New York, John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to move forward.
Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to prima ballerina, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life.
When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast.
Three muses—Song, Discipline, and Memory—weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph—to leave readers of this prize-winning debut breathless.
About the Author: Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Toll brings a long career in social justice to her work covering writers of color and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, The Washington Post, Pointe Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere. She also publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets. Toll has recently joined the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
About the Moderator: Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut short story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in November 2023. Her fiction, feature articles, essays, and book reviews appear in The Millions, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, CRAFT, The Bangalore Review, Arts & Letters, Pithead Chapel, Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, [PANK], Charlottesville Wine & Country Life, and elsewhere. She earned her fiction MFA from Lesley University and teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville.
To order Three Muses, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"A meditation on history, music, the catastrophic inheritances of the Holocaust, and the so common, painful hiddenness of hope itself, Three Muses captivates the reader from the first page to the last."
—Paul Harding
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