Claire Messud

"A glimpse into a beloved novelist's inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and...

Three friends near thirty--sophisticated Marina Thwaite; Danielle, a TV producer; and Julius, a freelance writer--make their way through New York City until Marina's idealistic cousin, Bootie, arrives to complicate their lives.