Download high-resolution image
Listen to a clip from the audiobook
audio play button
0:00
0:00

Information Desk

An Epic

Read by Robyn Schiff
Listen to a clip from the audiobook
audio play button
0:00
0:00
Audiobook Download
On sale Aug 15, 2023 | 1 Hour and 55 Minutes | 9780593683361

See Additional Formats
Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick

“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post

An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.New York Review of Books

A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)


Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.
© Nicole Craine
Robyn Schiff is the author of the poetry collections Information Desk: An Epic; Worth; Revolver; and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Schiff’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. The recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, she is a professor at the University of Chicago and coedits Canarium Books. View titles by Robyn Schiff

About

Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick

“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post

An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.New York Review of Books

A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)


Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

Author

© Nicole Craine
Robyn Schiff is the author of the poetry collections Information Desk: An Epic; Worth; Revolver; and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Schiff’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. The recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, she is a professor at the University of Chicago and coedits Canarium Books. View titles by Robyn Schiff

Books for National Depression Education and Awareness Month

For National Depression Education and Awareness Month in October, we are sharing a collection of titles that educates and informs on depression, including personal stories from those who have experienced depression and topics that range from causes and symptoms of depression to how to develop coping mechanisms to battle depression.

Read more

Horror Titles for the Halloween Season

In celebration of the Halloween season, we are sharing horror books that are aligned with the themes of the holiday: the sometimes unknown and scary creatures and witches. From classic ghost stories and popular novels that are celebrated today, in literature courses and beyond, to contemporary stories about the monsters that hide in the dark, our list

Read more

Books for LGBTQIA+ History Month

For LGBTQIA+ History Month in October, we’re celebrating the shared history of individuals within the community and the importance of the activists who have fought for their rights and the rights of others. We acknowledge the varying and diverse experiences within the LGBTQIA+ community that have shaped history and have led the way for those

Read more

Penguin Random House 2024 Pulitzer Winners and Finalists

John Updike. Edna Ferber. Wallace Stevens. Willa Cather. Robert Caro. Cormac McCarthy. Colson Whitehead (2x), Studs Terkel, Anne Tyler, John Steinbeck. These immortals are just a double-handful-plus of the Penguin Random House Pulitzer Prize winners across two centuries. They were joined on May 6 by two more honorees, Cristina Rivera Garza and Jayne Anne Phillips,

Read more