Insomniacs Know Better Than Anyone How It

This Is What You Do. You Make A Future For Yourself Out Of The Raw Material At Hand.

What I Wanted To Do Seemed Simple. I Wanted Something Alive And Shocking Enough That It Could Be A Morning In Somebody's Life. The Most Ordinary Morning. Imagine, Trying To Do That.

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?

I Don't Have Any Regrets, Really, Except That One. I Wanted To Write About You, About Us, Really. Do You Know What I Mean? I Wanted To Write About Everything, The Life We're Having And The Lives We Might Have Had. I Wanted To Write About All The Ways We Might Have Died.

There's The Fact That American Fiction Is Basically The Most Apolitical Fiction On The Globe. A South American Writer Wouldn't Dare Think Of Writing A Novel If It Didn't Allude To The System Into Which These People Are Orchestrated - Or An Eastern European Writer, Or A Russian Writer, Or A Chinese Writer. Only American Writers Are Able To Imagine That The Government And The Corporations - All Of It - Seem To Have No Effect Whatsoever.