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In this "deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere" debut (Helen Oyeyemi), a young graduate student writing about -- and desperately searching for -- inspiration stumbles upon it in the unlikeliest of places. Anna Brisker is a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English at Collegiate University who can't seem to finish her dissertation. Her project: an intellectual history of inspiration. And yet, for the first time, Anna has found herself utterly uninspired. Rather than work on her thesis, she spends her days eating Pop-Tarts and walking the gritty streets of New Harbor, Connecticut. As Anna's adviser is quick to remind her, time is running out. She needs the perfect case study to anchor her thesis, and she needs it now. Amid this mounting pressure, Anna strikes up a tenuous friendship with the niece of famous author Frederick Langley. Freddy wrote three successful books as a young man, then published exactly nothing for the rest of his wayward, hermetic life. Critics believe Freddy suffered from an acute case of writer's block, but his niece tells Anna that there's more to the story: When he died, he was at work on something new. With exclusive access to the notebooks of an author who was inspired, uninspired, and potentially reinspired, Anna knows she's found the perfect case study. But as fascination with Freddy blooms into obsession, Anna is drawn irrevocably into the criminal machinations of his sole living heir. A modern twist on the Parable of the Talents, Lapidos's debut is a many-layered labyrinth of possible truths that reveal at each turn the danger of interpreting another person's intentions -- literary or otherwise. One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year -- LitHub, The Millions, Thrillist, Entertainment Weekly Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she worked at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Slate. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and her MPhil in English Literature from Cambridge University, which she attended on a Gates Scholarship. "In TALENT, Juliet Lapidos pulls off a double feat. First, it's such a pleasure to think alongside the book's narrator as she gets caught up in the ultimate literary caper. Second, the laconic brilliance of the (fictional) author at the heart of this caper is in itself enough to induce tooth-gnashing envy. I gobbled down this deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves and each other."-Helen Oyeyemi, author of What is Not Yours is Not Yours "Enormously entertaining."-Lionel Shriver "A gem of a debut that's equal parts engrossing mystery and incisive comedy...In the great, long tradition of literary misanthropes, the jaded, aimless Anna feels fresh, imbuing the archetype with a crackling millennial spin."-EntertainmentWeekly "Lapidos' stabs at literary counterfeiting are inspired. She intersperses Anna's feckless investigation into Langley's past with notebook jottings that convincingly evoke the hunting and gathering of an alert writer as he sifts for fodder from childhood trauma and the detritus of daily experience."-New York Times Book Review "A clever and delightfully complicated debut novel... Each bend in this story raises more questions than are answered, in the best of ways and right to the end. More than a few little Easter eggs of literary trivia are offered along the way, too."-San FranciscoChronicle "Juliet Lapidos has written a funny, brainy mystery novel that's set inside a funny, brainy campus novel. Its heroines are a blocked academic who specializes in the history of inspiration, and an antique bookbinder who's coming apart. Oh, and the title of it all is Talent, which now means "natural aptitude or skill," but back in Greco-Roman days was a unit of money. Talent, then, is something you're going to want, in every definition. If you've ever thought to yourself, "I'm hungry," or, "The only

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