Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award), and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award. Her third novel, Weather, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2020.

She is also the author of four children's books, most recently Sparky. With Elissa Schappell, she co-edited the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything.

WEATHER (2020)

A New York Times Bestseller

Lizzie is a Librarian at the university where she was once a promising graduate student. She dropped out years ago in an attempt to rescue her younger brother from the throes of addiction. But one day her old mentor, Sylvia, asks for a favor. She wants Lizzie to answer the mail for her famous doom-laden podcast, Hell and High Water. Soon Lizzie is fielding questions from left wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of Western civilization. As Lizzie obsessively researches disaster psychology and survivalist strategies, her answers grow increasingly apocalyptic and unhinged.

“Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill’s third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis, including liberals fearing climate apocalypse and conservatives fearing the demise of ‘American values.’ As she attempts to save every’one, our protagonist is driven to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the power of human need.” — Esquire

“Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.” — Publisher’s Weekly

“Clever and seductive… the ‘weather’ of our days both real and metaphorical is perfectly captured in Offil’s brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world.” — Kirkus

“Revelatory… Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from ‘tipping into the abyss'.’” — Booklist

“Superb… a treasure trove of oddities… achieves a tricky balancing act… it is oddly captivating with its amusing gallows humour about crazy doomers, and at the same time it is also a deeply disturbing commentary about a thoughtful woman having an understandable existential crisis… a fitting fictional dance macabre for our spiralling existence” — Five star Review, The Independent

“This short book is beautifully crafted and full of laughs” — Sunday Business Post

"This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy.” — Ocean Vuong

“Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It’s this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present.” — Ben Lerner

“The new Jenny Offill has left me soft and clear and devastated, truly feel like I will never be the same.” — Jia Tolentino

“Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes.” — Sheila Heti

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore— they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they’re all cut from one diamond.” — Jonathan Dee

“There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. WEATHER is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved.” — Dana Spiotta

Rights: Knopf, North America; Granta, UK; NN Editore, Italy

DEPT. OF SPECULATION (2014) 

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 love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel.

“Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty, this book is both readable in a single sitting and far ranging in the emotions it raises . . . Offill has equal parts cleverness and erudition, but it’s her language and eye for detail that make this a must-read.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Exquisitely honed and vibrant . . . The reader easily identifies with [the narrator’s] struggles and frustrations . . . An enlightened choice for a reading group.”—Library Journal

“If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel, it might look something like this . . . Lyrical . . . Philosophically rich . . . Moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf.”—Kirkus

“Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I’ve read before. If I tell you that it’s funny, and moving, and true; that it’s as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it?”—Michael Cunningham

“Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.”—Sam Lipsyte

“A heartbreaking and exceptional book by a writer who doesn’t settle for less—I’ve been longing for a new novel from Jenny Offill since her stunning Last Things, and it was worth every bit of the wait. Sad, funny, philosophical, at once deeply poetic and deeply engaging, this is a brilliant, soulful elegy to the hardships and joys of married life.”—Lydia Millet

“Dept. of Speculation is a deep, funny, and beautifully written novel. It is a moving and intelligent story of a specific marriage, but it is also very much about how it feels to be alive right now. Jenny Offill perfectly captures the absurdities and ironies of our moment.”—Dana Spiotta
 

Rights: Knopf, North America; DVA, Germany; Calmann Levy, France; Novo Conceito, Brazil; Granta/Portobello, UK; Domingo, Turkey; De Geus, the Netherlands; Libros del Asteroide, Spain; NN Editore, Italy; Natur & Kultur, Sweden; Inaque, Slovakia; Relogio d’Agua, Portugal; Korea, Mujintree; Catalan, Ara Llibres; Norway, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag; Denmark, Gyldendal Dans

LAST THINGS (2014)

Grace's father believes in science and builds his daughter a dollhouse with lights that really work. Grace's mother takes her skinny-dipping in the lake and teaches her about African hyena men who devour their wives in their sleep. Grace's world, of fact and fiction, marvels and madness, is slowly unraveling because her family is coming apart before her eyes. Now eight-year-old Grace must choose between her two very different, very flawed parents, a choice that will take her on a dizzying journey, away from her home in Vermont to the boozy, flooded streets of New Orleans—and into the equally wondrous and frightening realm of her own imagination.

With eloquence and compassion, Jenny Offill weaves a luminous story of a wounded family and of a young girl yearning to understand the difference between fiction, fact, and hope. A novel of vibrant imagination and searing intelligence, Last Things is a stunning literary achievement.

“Last Things mines an interval of childhood before the division of intellectual labor. In this state of innocence, science, philosophy, mythology, bunk, wonder, and sorrow are all one. Jenny Offill's complicated and arresting farewell to this dangerous time is compelling as few recent novels on the subject have been."—Rick Moody

“If Last Things means things that will last, then Offill's book is one of them."—New York Times Book Review

"Offill's debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family. "—Publishers Weekly

Rights: Vintage, North America; Bloomsbury, UK; S. Fischer, Germany; NN Editore, Italy; De Geus, The Netherlands