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Literati is excited to welcome Lucy Ives for a reading from her new novel Impossible Views of the World.
About Impossible Views of the World
Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother—the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro—wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.
But the appearance of a strange map, depicting a mysterious 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)—on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your mind and heart intact.
Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including Anamnesis, a long poem that won the Slope Book Prize, and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Artforum, n+1, Conjunctions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with Triple Canopy, the Brooklyn-based online magazine. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at NYU.
