Praise for Costalegre
“Maum’s slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics.”
—The Boston Globe
“Wounded by her mother’s inattention, infatuated with a sculptor, burdened by her femaleness, and increasingly serious about making art, Lara is extraordinarily poignant. By internalizing and then transcending her sources, Maum has created a brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation.”
—Booklist
“With both humor and criticality, Maum’s coming-of-age novel probes the hypocrisy of the art world, the challenges of being a child of artists, and the dangers of not being loved.”
—Ploughshares
“A young girl follows her mother and a wayward group of artists into the Mexican jungle on the eve of World War II in this spare, enchanting novel . . . A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won’t be able to forget.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“When young Lara finds herself in Costalegre, living with her mother and a gaggle of nineteenth-century surrealist artists, wonder and mayhem ensues. With this slim novel, Courtney Maum has gifted her readers with a breathtaking meditation on youth, art, and the ever-mysterious bonds between mothers and daughters. Costalegre is a spectacular high-wire act that dazzles and devastates.”
—LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of The Third Hotel
“Mesmerizing and unsettling, Costalegre is a wonder, and Courtney Maum shows herself once again to be a writer of many gifts. This is a book for anyone who’s ever loved and not felt sufficiently loved in return; and for anyone who’s had to try to grow up; for, that is, everyone.”
—R. O. KWON, author of The Incendiaries
“This story of a daughter searching for connection all around her has a sharp cutting edge, a world that changes its mood in an instant; bleak as the dregs of a wine-soaked dinner, then bullish as a house of hapless surrealists attempting to boil an egg. Memorable and meaningful, Maum’s work remains with me as a reminder of love in the agony of teenage years and art in the terror of war.”
—AMELIA GRAY, author of Isadora
“Here is war, and here is art. And here is a child trying to become an adult in the midst of a Mexican exile. Maum’s stirred a brew of careless Bohemians, führers and failed art students, negligent mothers and missing museums. Costalegre is as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with our world.”
—SAMANTHA HUNT, author of The Dark Dark
Praise for Touch
“Exuberant . . . Maum’s writing is easy, eager and colloquial, as oxygenated as ad copy.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“At the heart of Maum’s smart, playful, satirical novel is the clash between technology and human interaction . . . As she demonstrated so well in her previous novel, [Maum] brings astute social observations to relationships, whether workplace or romantic.”
—The National Book Review, 1 of 5 Hot Books
“Maum’s incisive, charming, and funny novel ebulliently champions the healing powers of touch, the living world, and love in all its crazy risks, surprises, and sustaining radiance.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Maum . . . has such an incisive grasp of where tech and culture meet that she could add sociologist to her resume.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You
“Here we have the literary beach read—a book that pleases people who read two books a month and people who read two books a year . . . [Maum] is abundantly gifted—funny, open-hearted, adept at bringing global issues into the personal sphere . . . eventually creating that rare thing: a book for everyone.”
—The Washington Post
“Maum is funny: the kind of funny that is mean and dirty, with some good bad words thrown in. And she has a satiric eye for artsy pretension . . . Enticing.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Courtney Maum bursts onto the scene with a hilarious and wise novel . . . Richard Haddon is one of the more lovable male characters we’ve encountered this season . . . You’ll find yourself agog at Maum’s masterful storytelling and dead-on descriptions.”
—Glamour
“Antic, sexy, satirically deft, and of course funny, this novel is also, on both the personal and political levels, smart about the bottomlessness of our capacities for self-sabotage, and moving about the fierceness of our yearning to make good.”
—JIM SHEPARD, author of You Think That’s Bad and Like You’d Understand, Anyway
ALSO BY COURTNEY MAUM
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You
Touch
Costalegre
Before and After the Book Deal
Copyright © 2020 by Courtney Maum
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-948226-40-0
Cover design by Sarahmay Wilkinson
Book design by Jordan Koluch
Illustration by Amy Kurzweil and Courtney Maum
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941065
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the dreamers who sat down to tell a story
that no one asked them to write
Contents
Book One: Before the Book Deal
I. Getting it right
Making time to write (and then actually writing)
Killing your inner perfectionist
Making the most of your writing workshop