An exhilarating novel about a trailblazing mathematician who unearths her own extraordinary family story and its roots in World War II. A recommended book of 2019 from Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, and the Rumpus.

This July, the Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome acclaimed novelist Catherine Chung to Harrisburg as she presents and signs copies of her new historical novel, The Tenth Muse. Chung will be in conversation with Dickinson College’s Adrienne Su. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Book:

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition?

On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her—their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.

In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

About the Author:

Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director's Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before going to Cornell University for her MFA. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

About the Interviewer:

Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, Middle Kingdom, Sanctuary, Having None of It, and Living Quarters. Her poems have been featured on websites such as Poetry Daily and Poem-a-Day and could turn up on your mobile device if you use the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app. They also appear in anthologies such as The Hungry Ear; The New American Poets; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; Best American Poetry (2000, 2013, 2016); and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Su's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Frost Place, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (AB, 1989) and the University of Virginia (MFA, 1993). Since 2000, she has taught creative writing at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is Poet-in-Residence.