Metropolitan Stories

"Only someone who deeply loves and understands the Metropolitan Museum could deliver such madcap, funny, magical, tender, intimate fables and stories." --Maira Kalman, artist and bestselling author of The Principles of Uncertainty

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.

„Numai cineva care iubeste si intelege profund Muzeul Metropolitan ar putea livra astfel de fabule si povesti amuzante, magice, tandre, tandre, intime.” --Maira Kalman, artista si autorul bestseller-ului „Principiile incertitudinii” de la un scriitor care a lucrat la Muzeul Metropolitan mai mult de douazeci si cinci de ani, un roman feeric care ne arata Metul pe care publicul nu il vede.