Weather

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Jenny Offill has a very distinct writing style, and once you settle in, it's intoxicating. "Weather" is a physical representation of uncertainty, but it also embodies hope and encourages us to keep pushing through. This thought-provoking novel makes a lovely companion for a day at the park!  Recommended By Carrie K., Powells.com

Most of us can identify with Lizzie, the advice-slinging librarian at the center of Offill’s newest novel about life at the intersection of our polarized country. Navigating a whirlpool of left-wing and right-wing anxieties, climate crises, and the basic problems of everyday life, Lizzie struggles to answer everyone’s questions without losing her own footing. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com

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 works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink — she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction — but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.

"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

"Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that's a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it." Lydia Millet

"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 are all cut from one diamond." Jonathan Dee

"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

"No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill." Jia Tolentino

"Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical" USA Today

"Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill....[Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read...the funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them." Slate

"Genius....[A] lapidary masterwork....Remarkable and resonant....The right novel for the end of the world." The LA Times

"Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible...utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence...luminous." The Boston Globe

"Compact and wholly contemporary....As she attempts to save everyone, our protagonist is driven to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the power of human need." Esquire

"Brilliant...Offill's writing is brisk and comic, and her book's format underlines her gifts. "Weather" is her most soulful book...[Her] humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan." The New York Times

"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

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

"Revelatory....Offill...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 (Starred Review)

"Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Clever and seductive....[B]rief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award) and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen-Faulkner Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low-residency program at Queens University.