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Talent

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Talent

By: Juliet Lapidos
Narrated by: Khristine Hvam
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About this listen

A wickedly caustic tale of a student who stumbles on a literary treasure.

Anna Brisker, a once promising student, has fallen behind. Her PhD on inspiration is overdue, and instead she busies herself with power-eating strawberry Pop-Tarts and watching as her doctoral peers fly off to take posts at prestigious universities.

Alone over the holidays, Anna strikes up an unexpected and life-changing friendship. But what can Helen Langley, a middle-aged antiquarian bookbinder, have in her possession that might unlock Anna’s thesis and her chronic inertia? And what laws will Anna break to get it?

Lean and compulsively listenable, Talent is a literary romp that delights in its wicked lampooning of the academic world and asks how far we should go to meet our potential. And in Anna Brisker, we have an audacious heroine who cannot help but shine with mordant brilliance.

©2019 Juliet Lapidos (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
Amateur Sleuths Fiction Genre Fiction Jewish Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Mystery Women's Fiction World Literature Detective Student Comedy

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Critic reviews

"Talent is a wry meditation on ambition and an ingeniously constructed parable for our times. With wide-ranging erudition and pitch-perfect repartee, Juliet Lapidos reveals the terrible risk we take when we pity an artist." (Lucy Ives, author of Impossible Views of the World)

"The ultimate literary caper...deliciously funny." (Helen Oyeyemi)

"Juliet Lapidos grabs a story type at least as old as Henry James's The Aspern Papers and makes away with it into fast-moving, witty, literary adventure. With Pop-Tarts." (John Crowley, author of Little, Big)

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