"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...

Do they have a future together, or is their relationship ancient history? Anna Cohen, perpetual assistant at the Manhattan Museum of Jewish History, lands a golden chance to curate her own exhibit when her boss sends her to Rockliffe Manor, New York. She's to assist an influential Jewish family as they organize an exhibit of their own in time for the town's Summer Days Festival. While she's there, Anna just needs to convince them to part with some...

"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,...

"Will Morgan is a creature of habit--a low-budget insurance detective who walks to and from work with the flow of one-way traffic, and for whom imagination is a thing of the distant past. When a job opportunity enters the frame in the form of the mysterious Mr. Dinsdale--curator of the ever so slightly less-than-impressive Curioddity Museum--Will reluctantly accepts the task of finding a missing box of levity (the opposite of gravity). What he soon...

"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...

When New York City construction workers uncover the remains of thirty-six people murdered and dismembered over 130 years ago, archaeologist Nora Kelly and Special Agent Pedergast set out to investigate the killings.

"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...