1Q1A The Tenth Muse Catherine Chung

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse, published in June by Ecco.Catherine was honored for her first novel Forgotten Country and has been a National Endowment For The Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice and worked (enviably) at The Institute For Advanced Studies in Princeton. She has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago (which is very important to this book), worked at a think tank in Santa Monica and her writing has appeared in NYT and Granta and she is a fiction editor at Guernica (ger nee ka) magazine.The Tenth Muse is a novel about mathematics, problems with no solutions, at least for now. It is also about personal relationships, their parabolas and inconsistencies. And perhaps most importantly it is about Katherine and her search for her parents and her identity. What makes this book so wonderful is that all of these disparate subjects somehow whirl about and coalesce in many different ways, governed by strict rules that are sometimes broken or forgotten. In the end it is all about discovery and courage and to add the mystery to the mix, betrayal.