Treasure Palaces: Great Writers Visit Great Museums

This compilation of 23 articles originally written for the Authors on Museums series in the lifestyle magazine 1843 (formerly known as Intelligent Life) takes readers on an entertaining and idiosyncratic tour of obscure museums that have inspired and challenged famous authors throughout their lives. Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Ann Patchett, Ali Smith, and others give thoughtful personal recollections of visiting eclectic galleries such as the Museum of Heartbreak, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and Paris’s Musée Rodin. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Museum in London, notes in his foreword that “the most rewarding museum visit is one which involves communion between the viewer and a single object”; the authors’ essays reveal connections not only with art and artifacts but with other museum visitors. Roddy Doyle communes with American immigrants at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in N.Y.C.; Frank Cottrell Boyce examines shrunken heads at the Pitts River Museum in Oxford, England; Michael Morpurgo writes about the ghosts of WWI at the Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium; and Claire Messud feels at home at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The collection takes an intimate look both at the writers and the museums themselves, providing deep insights into how artists connect with the world around them. [em](Nov.) [/em]