Showing results by author "Jenny Offill" in All Categories

In Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill crafts a shimmering, fragmentary portrait of a marriage under pressure and a mind wrestling with love, ambition, motherhood, and the stories we tell ourselves to stay afloat. With sharp wit and clarity, Offill captures the inner weather of a woman whose life is both expanding and collapsing, tracing the small moments that accumulate into seismic shifts. This is a novel about uncertainty, devotion, creativity, and the quiet catastrophes that define being human—told with Offill’s singular blend of humor, lyricism, and emotional precision.

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, 'Hell and High Water', and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation—one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year—a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie Benson slid into...