Andrea Avery
2024 NOVELLA PRIZE SELECTED BY Kelcey Ervick
ISBN 9781881163756
Forthcoming 2025
$17.00
Enid Bluff has begun to fall out of love with music, not only because her ideas are too often dismissed by her male classmates (and professors) in the composing program where she studies at a mid-tier university, but because the boys’-club mentality around her has made this a lonely place to be, much less create. That changes, however, with the arrival of an enigmatic young woman who turns out to be the long-lost, presumed-dead American composer Gloria Clifford, straight from Baltimore in 1910. At nineteen, Gloria is at the beginning of her musical career, but she is already ensnared in an intoxicating and confusing relationship with her much older musical mentor—and soon-to-be husband—Luther Langdon. What follows is a story about friendship, the struggle to be both a woman and an artist, and those imbalances of power which end up repeating like unfortunate refrains, time and again.
Reviews & Such
- I am obsessed with this book . . . Andrea Avery’s savvy and searching protagonist is on a quest to learn the tragic past of a mysterious visitor, even as she tries to reimagine her own future as a female artist. With searing humor and feminist fury, Visiting Composer is set powerfully against a backdrop of music, literature, and the teachers and systems that fail us.
–Kelcey Ervick, author of The Keeper and The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová
Final judge, 2024 Miami University Press Novella Prize
- Andrea Avery’s Visiting Composer is a fast, spooky, quietly devastating, paradoxically animating read. Her characters are reaching beyond a linear world of space and time, and the patriarchy that has determined its perimeters, for beauty, art, and connection stripped of their modern baggage. Whether they fully become or must abandon themselves in the process is the heart of the mystery of this elegant, haunting book.
–Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb and Lions, co-author of Love in the Anthropocene - Gorgeous, layered, and full of feeling, this brief trip out of time and into the hearts and minds of two psychically connected young composers is a delight. Avery knows how to write about music—about the people whose main love is music, and the creeps who live to take advantage of them—more movingly and accurately than anyone I’ve come across. This is a fantastic piece of work. –Gregory Spatz, musician, author of What Could Be Saved: Bookmatched Novellas & Stories
About the Author
Andrea Avery is the author of Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano (Pegasus Books), which is being adapted for the stage. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse, CRAFT Literary, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Real Simple, and other places. She holds a B.A. in music, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an Ed.D, all from Arizona State University. She is working on a novel.
