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Fletcher Agency
Melissa Chinchillo |
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| English | |
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| www.courtneymaum.com | |
COSTALEGRE
It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. In the haut-bohemian circles of Austria, Germany, and Paris, Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of "cultural degenerates" - artists, writers, and thinkers - whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime. Feisty and impetuous, the Paris-based modern art enthusiast and American heiress, Leonora Calaway is determined to expatriate as many artists as she can before Hitler imprisons them and burns their artwork. She begins chartering boats and planes for her favored surrealists to the faraway destination of Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle where Leonora has a home.
The story of what happens to these artists when they reach their destination is told from the first person point of view of Lara, Leonora's beautiful and much neglected 14-year-old daughter, who has been pulled out of school to follow her mother to Mexico. Forced from a young age to cohabit with her mother's eccentric whims, tortured lovers, and entourage of gold-diggers, Lara is suffering from a lack of emotional, educational, and geographical stability that a Mexican sojourn with a stable of surrealists isn't going to help. But when she meets the outcast Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, a much older man who has already been living in Costalegre for some time, Lara thinks she might have found the love and understanding she so badly craves.
Sinuous and striking, heartbreaking and strange, COSTALEGRE is Courtney Maum at her satirical best. Heavily inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, and buttressed by extensive research on the surrealists of the 19th century, COSTALEGRE is a wildly imaginative and curiously touching story about a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for except for a mother who loves her back. With the searching, melancholy voice of Laura Van den Berg and Catherine Lacey and the raw humor of Otessa Mosfegh, COSTALEGRE is a testament to the expansive talent and narrative compassion that made Maum's prior novels such hits.
Courtney Maum is the author of TOUCH (a New York Time editor's choice and NPR's Best of 2017), as well as the acclaimed I AM HAVING SO MUCH FUN HERE WITHOUT YOU and the chapbook, NOTES FROM MEXICO, on which COSTALEGRE is based. Her book reviews, essays and articles about the writing life have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, BuzzFeed, Interview Magazine and Electric Literature. In addition to writing, Courtney works for companies such as MAC as a product and shade namer, and she's also the founder of the interdisciplinary creative retreat, The Cabins, a peer-based knowledge exchange program that brings writers, artists, dancers and filmmakers to the Norfolk woods for four days to cross-pollinate.
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Book
Published 2019-07-16 by Tin House Books |