It’s July, and that means The Painting and the City is officially out.

From the book jacket:

What is the secret contained in Philip Schuyler’s painting? Who was the woman he depicted, the innocent woman and her dark stalker? The Kreunen sisters know, but they must re-bury the past. And Jacob Lerner, artist flailing in a sea of commerce, can only press forward, explore his own art and the mystery of Schuyler’s painting, aided and manipulated by an animate marionette of rosy glass…

Manhattan, summer, in the rosy dawn of the 21st century, the sculptor Jacob Lerner sees a painting at a friend’s apartment and is drawn into an obsessive search for traces of its long-dead painter, fictional 19th-century artist Philip Schuyler, and his subject, a woman called Madame Burgundy. The search leads to the remains of a once-powerful but still wealthy Dutch-American secret society, and carries Lerner through real and surreal Manhattan streets, buildings, and countryside. Finding Schuyler’s journal draws Lerner in deeper. Finding the dapper marionette makes it impossible for Lerner to escape.

The Painting and the City tells a story of art and its conflict with commerce, the way art can (literally) reshape the world, and the consequences of such a reshaping.

Available in slipcased and trade hardcover editions.

Review in the July 2 New York Times of the Manahatta Project exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York. I first posted about it here.

From the museum’s site:

Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City will reveal the island of Mannahatta at the time of Henry Hudson’s arrival—a fresh, green new world at the moment of discovery.  Through cutting edge multi-media and historical artifacts and maps, Mannahatta/Manhattan will re-imagine the quiet, wooded island at the mouth of a great river that was destined to become one of the greatest cities on Earth.  Moreover, Mannahatta/Manhattan will challenge visitors to view the city of today as a place where the relationship between nature and people is at its most important and to understand that the principles of diversity, interdependence, and interrelativity operate in a modern mega-city much as they do in nature.  In doing so, the exhibition will contribute something new to the history of New York—a view of its ecological origin—and in that contribution, shape the future as well.

One of the themes of The Painting and the City concerns how New York City grew in opposition to its natural features, leveling hills, filling in bodies of water, etc., so the exhibit feels like a companion to my novel. I’ll be in New York next month for a reading (August 19th, KGB), and am very much looking forward to seeing the exhibit.