Feast Your Eyes

Myla Goldberg is the bestselling author of Feast Your Eyes, The False Friend, Wickett's Remedy, and Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award. It was adapted to film and widely translated. In addition to her novels, she has written an essay collection, a children's book, and short stories that have appeared in Harper's. She teaches in the fiction programs at Sarah Lawrence and NYU and has been known to sing and play accordion and banjo in the Brooklyn art-punk band The Walking Hellos. She was also the subject of a song by The Decemberists, "Song for Myla Goldberg." She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jason Little and their two daughters.

"A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood."
--O, the Oprah Magazine

"Inventive ... Goldberg offers a searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time."
--The New Yorker

"Wrenchingly intimate...Goldberg's passionate depiction of Lillian rings heartbreakingly true at a moment when discussions of emotional labor dominate certain sectors of the media and writers like Kim Brooks and Claire Vaye Watkins write viral essays contemplating whether it is truly possible to be both an artist and a mother."
--Joanna Rakoff, The New York Times

"Lively and vivid... Goldberg expertly differentiates the voices of [her characters] ... fascinating."
--Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"With cleverness and imagination, vivid historical detail and great heart, this catalog tells the story of Lillian's life...Lillian Preston also represents an exciting turn of events in the career of her creator, Myla Goldberg, [who] has reemerged with a stunning success, what feels like the book she was always meant to write...Through its intense focus on a series of photographs, a group of quirky characters and a particular time in our cultural history, Feast Your Eyes becomes a universal and profound story of love and loss."
--Marion Winik, Newsday

"If you're stuck in a reading rut, Feast Your Eyes will snap you right out of it."
--Elizabeth Entenman, HelloGiggles

"Like a photograph that captures the inner light of its subject, Feast Your Eyes catches such moments on the page, il-luminating the power of both beauty and heartbreak. Goldberg unsparingly reveals a driven artist whose propulsive talent is also her Achilles' heel."
--BookPage

"The action in Feast Your Eyes unfurls entirely in program notes for a retrospective of Lillian's work in the Modern Museum of Art -- expect a mix of letters, analysis of Lillian's photographs, and commentary from Samantha, who's curating the exhibit. Through this collage comes a gripping portrait of Lillian: a fierce mother, a fierce artist, and a woman crucified for both."
--Refinery 29

"A mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit."
--Lit Hub

"From Bee Season (2000) onward, Goldberg has portrayed girls and young women with fluent sensitivity. In her brilliantly structured fourth novel, she revisits the theme again, in the story of photographer Lillian Preston, who, chronically shy yet determined, flees Cleveland for New York in 1953 at 17 and becomes an accidental single mother at 19... This is a novel of infinite depth, of caring authenticity both intimate and societal, of mothers and daughters, art and pain, and transcendent love."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist, STARRED

"A riveting portrait of an artist who happens to be a woman."
--Kirkus Reviews, STARRED

"This story is feminist at its core ... A strong book club pick."
--Library Journal

"Goldberg evocatively profiles a brilliant woman whose identities--as woman, artist, and mother--are inseparable from one another... a memorable portrait of one artist's life."
--Publishers Weekly

"Reading Myla Goldberg's Feast Your Eyes reminded me of other unlikely adventure stories, like Hillary's summit of the Himalayas, or Shackleton's return from Antarctica. Only here the human constraints are still more challenging: making art as a single mother in a twentieth century dominated, and distorted, by men. This is an unflinching, deeply moving portrait of the artist, and a bravura performance in and of itself. I loved this book."
--Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour