Sign Up to Beta-Read My Newest Novel, The Leverkühn Quartet

I wrote a novel about a violinist. Here’s how you can be the first to read it.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been hard at work writing my latest novel, The Leverkühn Quartet. I’m thrilled to share that the manuscript is nearing completion—and I’m now looking to gauge feedback from a select group of readers here on Pens and Poison.

The Leverkühn Quartet is a deeply personal work. It follows the ex-violinist Elise Goldberg as she is drawn back into the world of music when her eccentric ex-lover recruits her to join an avant-garde string quartet. Elise is initially torn—she enjoys a stable life with her lucrative banking job and her somewhat religious fiancé and categorically rejects the bohemian life. But when a rift with her childhood best friend inspires her to use music as an escape, she is inevitably pulled back into the chaotic art world and must navigate questions of identity, love, tradition, and artistic sacrifice —all while preparing for a high-stakes performance at Carnegie Hall.

The novel is a (very) loose retelling of Thomas Mann’s famous musical novel Doctor Faustus, which tells the story of the brilliant composer Adrian Leverkühn as he rises to prominence through a metaphorical deal with the Devil. Faustus explores the cost of artistic brilliance; my novel—named, of course, after Mann’s great composer—re-envisions the implications of many of Mann’s themes in the twenty-first century.

While it was not in my stars to join the world of music professionally, music has been an important part of my life ever since I was a kid—I attend concerts almost weekly, play the violin on occasion, and spend lots of time in classical music circles. I’ve written previously about the decline of classical music literacy in young people and wanted to create a vision that brings classical music to a younger audience by interspersing discussions of classical music with more contemporary themes of identity and belonging.

I am excited to share my novel with a select group of readers in the coming weeks. To avoid chaos (I had enough of that while writing the book), I am opening this initial round of beta-reads to paid subscribers, who will have exclusive access to the full novel as a thank you for supporting Pens and Poison.

If The Leverkühn Quartet sounds interesting to you, then this might be your calling to snag that Pens and Poison subscription! I will also be sending out $25 gift cards as a thank you to all beta-readers, so your $5 donation to Pens and Poison will pay for itself!

If you object to such a transaction and wish to remain a free subscriber, I will be in touch later this year to collect further impressions of the novel’s opening chapters, so please stay tuned!

Thank you again for your support of Pens and Poison! I hope to get The Leverkühn Quartet out to everyone soon!