Talent

A wickedly funny debut in which the niece of a legendary and enigmatic writer forever alters the life and work of a young student writing about—and desperately searching for—inspiration. Anna Brisker is a 29-year-old graduate student in English at Collegiate University who can't seem to finish her dissertation. Her project: an intellectual history of inspiration. Her take: that the way writers and artists describe the moment of inspiration - that it strikes indiscriminately, that it's handed down from on high and entirely out of their control - is really just self-serving bullshit designed to elevate the artist above the rest of us. To Anna, whose academic prowess has never before been in question, inspiration is just another name for good old fashioned work. Plain and simple. And yet, for the first time, Anna has found herself utterly and truly uninspired. Rather than work on her thesis, she spends her days eating strawberry Pop-Tarts and wandering...