Martha Anne Toll is a novelist, book reviewer, essayist, and social justice advocate. She wants to visit your book group!
Hot off the press! Martha has a new novel coming out in 2025: Duet for One.
Three Muses won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Buzzfeed, NPR and the Washington Post have given Three Muses a lot of love. With a starred review from Kirkus, Three Muses made The Millions’ most anticipated second half of 2022 list. Vulture Magazine included it in “57 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Fall.” L.A. Parent called it “an exquisitely crafted novel, and POINTE Magazine selected it for its “5 New Ballet Books to Look Forward to This Fall.”
Martha writes a biweekly newsletter that’s an insider’s view to all things books, ballet, classical music, Jewish culture, and social justice.
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For synagogues, sisterhoods, & Jewish book clubs: contact Martha directly or via the Jewish Book Council
Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet.
Advance Praise:
“Martha Anne Toll’s three muses are those of song, discipline, and memory…. A meditation on history, music, the catastrophic inheritances of the Holocaust, and the so common, painful hiddenness of hope itself, Three Muses captivates the reader from the first page to the last.”
- Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and Enon
“Martha Anne Toll's Three Muses is so surprisingly soulful. The surprise … lies in how that textured prose actually creates a new time signature wholly dependent on practice and discipline. This is phenomenal writing. It just is.”
- Kiese Makeba Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Long Division
Martha was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize for her short story “The Gigolo.” Her fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale's Letters Journal, Poetica E Magazine, and elsewhere.
Martha reviews books, interviews authors, and writes essays for NPR, the Washington Post, The Millions, Washington Post's The Lily, Bloom, Music & Literature, Tin House blog, and elsewhere. Her personal essay, "Dayenu," was selected for an anthology featuring a range of well-known writers.