Singing into the Piano

“A fascinating work” (Newsday) of intellectual and erotic provocation in which a couple are drawn into the high-wire political campaign and marriage of a Mexican popular hero who’s running for his country’s presidency.

At a political fundraiser in New York, Andrew and Edith inaugurate their love affair with a brazen sexual spectacle. Watching them is the event’s speaker, Santiago Diaz, a Mexican popular hero running for his country’s presidency. He is aroused, disturbed, and intent on finding the couple whose erotic risk-taking parallels his own high-wire career.

Soon Andrew and Edith are drawn into Diaz’s life and the vortex of trans-American politics where plunder dictates policy, loyalty is devalued currency, and the future of nations is decided by talk-show appearances and terror.Praise for Ted Mooney

“[A] combustible literary cross between Hawkesian avant-garde and Don DeLillo’s post-modern cool.” —The New York Times

“Unsettling, coolly intense.... Mooney is a risk-taking adventurer in novelistic possibilities.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Equally enchanting and disorienting.” —Boston Book Review

"A novelist with a gift for razor-sharp dialogue, for the brilliantly chiseled sentence, and the memorably vivid scene.... A fascinating work." —NewsdayTED MOONEY is the author of Easy Travel to Other Planets, Traffic and Laughter, Singing into the Piano, and The Same River Twice. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Granta, and The New American Review, and he received grants from the Guggenheim and the Ingram Merrill foundations. He died in 2022.