Praise for The Cloud of Knowing " The Cloud of Knowing is a dazzling novel that contains multitudes. It is at once a mystery, a comedy of manners, and a moving portrayal of a New York City that has almost ceased to exist. Taylor has a genius for deploying delightfully apt details about his characters and the cultural world they inhabit as he shares a story about secrets and lies, high fidelity and infidelity. I gasped when I got to the end, and started reading all over again for the sheer pleasure of it." --Will Schwalbe, author of We Should Not Be Friends " The Cloud of Knowing is a tour de force of voice: Benjamin Taylor's central character--elderly, cantankerous, large-hearted Francie, the widow of a famous and compulsively unfaithful composer--narrates her experience. Through her, everyone else springs to life--especially the dead, like her husband, and his teacher/admirer/would-be lover Amos. It's a generous book about love--manic heterosexual infidelity, gay love, mother/son love, art love . And finally, a story of redemptive acceptance.

It's a spree, a moving adventure, a spirited New York Art Story dotted with recognizable figures and many ingeniously concocted ones. A beautiful invention." --Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters and Hindsight "Benjamin Taylor has written a rip-roaring, genre-defying mystery in a captivating voice that's easy to fall for and impossible to forget. Plus there's a twisty ending to knock any reader back. Destined to be this year's literary sleeper hit! Unputdownable." --Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Memoir " The Cloud of Knowing is one of the most original and nuanced novels I've read in a long time. Written in a style that manages to be both forceful and undulant, the novel takes on quintessential themes of creativity, originality, mortality, success, failure, and the private secrets that dog public lives. The persistent young biographer Daniel Sidorsky with his breath that is "none of the freshest," and the crotchety but ultimately vulnerable widow of the composer Rafael Bogenschine, whose life and legacy Sidorsky wishes to expose, are memorable and endearing.

Patchin Place in the West Village, becomes a character all its own, helping to place the story in a vivid context. Taylor is at the apogee of his singular and arresting style. If Henry James were writing today and wrote less labyrinthine sentences with a bit more bite, The Cloud of Knowing would be a worthy--and accessible!--addition to his oeuvre." --Daphne Merkin, author of 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.