The Writer’s Center welcomes Martha Anne Toll to celebrate the release of her debut novel, Three Muses. Martha will be in conversation with author Alice Stephens. Book signing to follow.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required below.
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 and is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on September 20, 2022. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets.
Alice Stephens‘ debut novel, Famous Adopted People, was published in 2018 by Unnamed Press. She is the editor of Bloom, a book reviewer, co-facilitator of the Adoptee Voices Writing Group, co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival, and columnist for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
About the Book
“…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, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and Enon
Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, 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. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. 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.