Lucy Ives is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and has completed a PhD in the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. She 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, 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 and arts organization whose archives was acquired by NYU’s Fales Archive. Ms. Ives is also an Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Pratt Institute.
IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD
“[An] intricate, darkly funny debut. . . there is so much going on in this novel, so many sharp observations packed into sentences as sensual and jarring as a Mardi Gras parade that it bears a second look. . . Ives, an accomplished poet, infuses even mundane actions with startling imagery. . . It’s a smart novel brimming with ideas about love, art, personal agency, a lack thereof, and for the astute reader, a couple of minor characters sporting J. Crew.”
—Susan Coll, New York Times Book Review
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 brain and heart intact. 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 is stalking her, a workplace romance 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 wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.
But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics—on an all-consuming research mis-sion. 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.