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Adam Mars-Jones: Jenny Offill, 2 July 2020

Weather 
by Jenny Offill.
Granta, 207 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 78378 476 9
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... exercise in fantasy that was revealed as hopelessly timid when the election result was announced. Jenny Offill’s novel Weather is an attempt to grapple with a future that is hard to inhabit imaginatively, the consequences of climate change as they come ever closer, but it too suffers from an abrupt turn in the world outside the book, the advent of an ...

No Such Thing as Women

Madeleine Schwartz: Reproduction Anxiety, 23 September 2021

Heaven 
by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
Picador, 176 pp., £14.99, June, 978 1 5098 9824 4
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... insufficient. Breasts and Eggs flirts with some of the same themes that have occupied writers like Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk. But, unlike the characters in their novels, Natsu isn’t interested in whether motherhood is incompatible with creative work. What she wants to find out is whether motherhood is incompatible with being a good person. Her ...

I feel sorry for sex

Erin Maglaque: Lauren Berlant’s Maximalism, 18 May 2023

On the Inconvenience of Other People 
by Lauren Berlant.
Duke, 238 pp., £21.99, September 2022, 978 1 4780 1845 2
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... of historical affect. Contemporary novels by authors such as Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh and Jenny Offill convey the inertia and passivity Berlant describes in Cruel Optimism. In Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the central character drugs herself with sleeping pills to switch off from ‘anything that might pique my intellect or ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... made him want to be a writer; Miranda July keeps Flying to America on her bedside table; Jenny Offill returns regularly to ‘Not-Knowing’; and George Saunders has filled the slot for a satirical ‘vaudevillian’ at the New Yorker. In different ways, they are all figuring out what it means to come after ...

A Great Deaf Bear

James Wood: Beethoven gets going, 7 January 2021

Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces 
by Laura Tunbridge.
Penguin, 276 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 241 41427 9
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The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography 
by Mark Evan Bonds.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.99, January 2020, 978 0 19 006847 9
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Beethoven: Variations on a Life 
by Mark Evan Bonds.
Oxford, 147 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 005408 3
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Beethoven: The New Complete Edition 
Deutsche Grammophon, 123 discs, November 2019Show More
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... vouched for him that he was released.’So Beethoven became – perhaps always was – what Jenny Offill calls in her novel Dept of Speculation (2014) an ‘art monster’. But this was partly because music was also becoming an art monster. As the form went from persuasive rhetoric to subjective outpouring, it also underwent a change in ...

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