Museum of Stones

books by Lynn Lurie

Museum of Stones

Museum of Stones, Early 2019

Summary of Museum of Stones

Like a spell cast over mother and son, Museum of Stones's terse scenes reveal a possessive/obsessive world of a love that must be released. An exceptional child, the boy collects far too many rocks, invents a garbage recycler that runs amok, does not "play well." The extended family is cruel and dubious. His mother takes their relationship to painful extremities, threatening her own sanity and health, in a wrenching, yet often funny account that culminates in a terrifying trip in a rubber boat fleeing Peruvian revolutionaries.

Latest News & Events

"What Moves Me Most Doesn't Have a Beginning, Middle, or End"
Melissa Cronin in Conversation with Lynn Lurie, Author of MUSEUM OF STONES

Interview — Heavy Feather Review

click to read the interview

The Truth Is Always So Strange: A Conversation With Lynn Lurie & Terese Svoboda

Interview — Medium.com

click to read the full story

Lynn Lurie's Playlist for Her Novel "Museum of Stones"

Review & Audio — by: Largehearted Boy

At the heart of Museum of Stones is a possessive/obsessive love between a mother and a son that must be released. The boy, an exceptional child, collects too many rocks, invents a garbage recycler that runs amok, does not "play well." His mother takes their relationship to extremes, threatening her sanity and health. Her playlist reflects her turmoil as she tries to address her anger, her failures and isolation.

click to read more and hear the playlist

Reading with Lynn Lurie and Terese Svoboda

Reading & Meet

March 31, 2019 at 7:00 - 9:00 pm
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, NYC
click to visit the website

Review for Museum of Stones:
"Parenthood has its many nightmares—a sizable genre of which could be labelled 'The Inadequacy of One's Love.' Lynn Lurie's Museum of Stones is a devastating and beautiful collage of such nightmarish scenes, broken shards layered to accurately reflect decades of heartbreaking and terrifying tableaux, now muffled (yet terrorizing still) in the cotton of memory. And yet what thin, sweet ray does shoot through is that the love, indeed, was human-sized and enough." - Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs, Fog & Car, and The Strangers.

Review for Museum of Stones:
"Lynn Lurie writes here with precision, power, and clarity about all that is most important—those things that sizzle and shriek, burn, and roar in the tunnels and caverns of the heart. Museum of Stones is a beautiful book and Lurie a marvelous writer." - Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and The Evening Road.

Review for Museum of Stones:
"The radiance of Lynn Lurie's vision emanates from the devastating frisson between the fragility of the body and the futility of love to spare us the desolating solitude of grief. In Museum of Stones, the enormity of the speaker's loss pulses through each piercing iteration of her child's story. Yet writing itself is hope, attention a kind of prayer, an insistence on life, testimony to the desire to recover the shreds and shards of memory, to make from them a space where all things at once are and ever shall be possible." -Melanie Rae Thon, author of Author of Silence and Song

Review for Museum of Stones:
"At the center of Museum of Stones exists the nameless narrator's son, whose frail presence helps weave together memory, hurt, hope, and the grim realization that in the end we're all made of holes, not wholes. Lurie's novel is at once a beautifully condensed, understated, brave, risky associative lyric, a passionate and compassionate meditation, and a gorgeous elegy about the temporal rubble of us." -Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris

Review for Museum of Stones:
"Museum of Stones is a dreamy, haunting, clamorous book by one of the bravest souls anywhere."
-Noy Holland, author of I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE