“Metropolitan Stories” by Christine Coulson

This enchanting novel, from a writer who worked at the Metropolitan Museum for more than twenty-five years, shows us the Met that the public doesn’t see. A surreal love letter to this private side of the museum, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.