Review
From the book
jacket: a poignant and comic first
novel about a delightfully sincere
modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a
typical Russian girl, living with her
bookish professor mother in a drab
Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya
becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and
settles on her life’s calling: she will
be the companion to a great writer. Her
memoirs tell of her immigration to New
York after college, the stifling
expectations of her Brighton Beach
cousins, and the crucial moment in a
bookshop on the Upper West Side, where
Tanya attends a reading by Mark
Schneider, a Significant New York
Novelist.
Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready...
Beyond the Book
Lara Vapnyar
emigrated from
Russia to New
York in 1994 and
began publishing
short stories in
English in 2002.
She lives on
Staten Island
and is pursuing
a Ph.D. in
comparative
literature at
CUNY Graduate
Center. The
inspiration for
Memoirs of a
Muse came
from her
graduate
studies. One of
her options for
a PhD project
was to translate
an...
