Kim Lord is an avant-garde figure, feminist icon, and agent provocateur in the L.A. art scene. Her groundbreaking new exhibition Still Lives is comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous, murdered women--the Black Dahlia, Chandra Levy, Nicole Brown Simpson, among many others--and the works are as compelling as they are disturbing, implicating a culture that is too accustomed to violence against women. As the city's richest art patrons...

"A chemistry-filled childhood friends to enemies to lovers debut romance about two people forced to confront their pasts to save both their relationship and careers. Daniel Rosenberg and Liyah Cohen-Jackson's last conversation--fourteen years ago at summer camp--ended their friendship. Until they find themselves seated next to each other on a plane, and bitterly pick up right where they left off. At least they can go their separate ways again after...

"A witty, urbane, and sometimes shocking debut novel, set in a hallowed New York museum, in which a co-worker's disappearance and a mysterious map change a life forever 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,...

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,...

"Following the death of a renowned and eccentric collector-author of Stuff, a seminal philosophical work on the art of accumulation-the fate of the privately endowed museum he cherished falls to a peripatetic stranger who had been his fervent admirer. This peculiar institution (The Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan) is dedicated to the annihilation of hierarchy: peerless antiquities commune happily with the...

"Curator of paleontology Dr. Simon Nealy never expected to return to his Pennsylvania hometown, let alone the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History. He was just a boy when his six-year-old sister, Morgan, was abducted from the museum under his watch, and the guilt has haunted Simon ever since. After a recent break-up and the death of the aunt who raised him, Simon feels drawn back to the place where Morgan vanished, in search of the bones they never...

"Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by way of a "relatively short" nine page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their...

Charlotte Hilaire, museum courier, and Adrianna Coates, art historian, rekindle a college romance in Madrid, Spain. Can this long distance relationship be maintained when Charlotte returns to the United States? Charlotte Hilaire's work as a museum courier takes her around the world, but her plan to become a professor is veering dangerously off track. When a blizzard strands Charlotte in Spain for a few extra days, she's left with glorious free time...

"Brenae Brazil is a rising star at Los Angeles Art College, the most prestigious art school in the country, and a pupil of the institution's equally famous and influential director, Hal Giroux. Brenae's path to art world stardom is all but assured, so why did she kill herself shortly after completing a provocative documentary about female bodies, violence, and self-defence? Maggie Richter's return to LA and her old job at the Rocque Museum was supposed...