Lady Lazarus - Hardcover

Who in the world is Calliope Bird?

Calliope Bird Morath, that is. Poet. Celebrity. Death Artist.

Her father, Brandt Morath, was a legendary punk-rock star whose suicide devastated the world. Her mother, Penny Power, has spent a decade grieving, keeping Brandt's memory alive, and preparing Calliope for fame. Now Calliope has grown up to be a star in her own right, trading on her family name, trying to navigate the worlds of art and celebrity, academia and psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, all while exploring the mysteries surrounding her father's life and death.  Because of her own unreliable memories and the obsessive speculation of her father's fans, she comes to believe that her father might still be alive, and she abandons her own life to try and find him.

       And, in turn, Calliope's obsessive biographer abandons life and family in search of Calliope. Together they chronicle her story, from her silent childhood to her first tortured public statements about her father; from her publication of a wildly popular book of poetry to her mysterious disappearance; from her return as the mute leader of a cultlike brigade known as The Muse to her last, terrifying crusade.

Ultimately, the biographer, whose own tragic history is revealed only in glimpses, clashes with Calliope's in a spectacular showdown in the Mojave Desert. 

"Altschul is one of our great young writers, and Lady Lazarus is the proof. A poetic satire of rock and roll, and a rock and roll ode to poetry, it mirrors its heroine: smart, gorgeous, and funny as hell." --Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

?These pages are lit by the most seditious literary cunning. This big, taunting, passionate, ambitious tale, told in a multiplicity of voices, skewers our culture's infatuation with surfaces and our habit of maiming or killing the objects of our collective infatuation: this is glittering wordplay whose bottom note is sorrow. Andrew Altschul may be shinily modern--postmodern--in every other way, but he is also that ancient thing, a born storyteller capable of breaking your heart."?Elizabeth Tallent, author of Museum Pieces