Join us via Zoom for a conversation between authors Martha Anne Toll and Devi Laskar. We’ll be celebrating the release of Martha Anne Toll’s new novel, Three Muses, and Devi Laskar also has a recent release, Circa.
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.
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 BIPOC 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.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of the 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South; winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; and finalist for the Northern California Book awards. Her second novel, Circa was published May 3, 2022 by Mariner Books. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner in early 2024. She holds degrees from Columbia University, University of Illinois and UNC-CH. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.
Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83949015855?pwd=UWtFbURLWnZFQ2lBc1FBN2pGMktjZz09
Meeting ID: 839 4901 5855
Passcode: 373231
This event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.