Museum of Stones

Museum of Stones is a magnificent and bracing trek through motherhood. In a series of well-placed stones of urgent prose poetry, Museum of Stones reveals the fates in store for this newborn boy: wrists “no wider than a straw” and sternum sporting a tiny tower of gauze, hospital monitors aglow in their wide range of numbers and, later, “neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of [the boy’s] numerical codes.” The book illumines the mutable states of the mother: the means by which she must carve herself, with “no distortions or duplications,” from what precious daily clay is left.


―Diane Raptosh, National Book Award Semi-Finalist


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


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


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


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


Museum of Stones is a dreamy, haunting, clamorous book by one of the bravest souls anywhere.


―Noy Holland, I Was Trying To Describe What It Feels Like