The Tenth Muse
A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2019 FROM: Buzzfeed * The Rumpus * Entertainment Weekly
The first thing I remember being said of me with any consistency was that I was intelligent--and I recognized even then that it was a comment leveled at me with as much disapproval as admiration. Still, I never tried to hide or suppress my mind as some girls do, and thank God, because that would have been the beginning of the end.
From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems--who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition?
On her quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her--their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.
In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.
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Catherine Chung won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, and has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.
"The Tenth Muse centers on Katherine, an aspiring mathematician whose studies take her deep into her family history and a legacy of genius and empowerment which probes compelling questions about her identity."
-- "Entertainment Weekly""Impressive, poignant...Chung's novel boldly illustrates that truth and beauty can reside even amid the messiest solutions."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)""Chung's novel, with its formality and clean chronology, seems a throwback to another time, like a perfectly tailored tuxedo...A powerful and virtuosically researched story about the mysteries of the head and the heart."
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)""Mathematics and its history, the legacy of WWII, and the struggles women face in pursuing academic success, especially in fields dominated by men, are woven into this novel that Chung renders in polished prose."
-- "Booklist""Chung's development of key characters is strong, her light prose flows easily throughout, and she successfully represents a young woman attempting to find her identity and stand out in a field dominated by men."
-- "Library Journal"
