Acts of Service

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Lillian Fishman’s debut is a smart and extremely current interrogation of queerness and modern sexual ethics, populated with intriguingly complex characters, all told in an enthralling voice. Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com

I had been going around for years trying to figure out what sex meant to other people. . . .

Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she's wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship — one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.

As each act of their affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?

In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman's riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.

“Young, queer, and Brooklyn-based, Eve has an adventurous streak that leads her to post nude photos of herself online. This is how she meets sly Olivia and through Olivia the magnetic Nathan.“ Library Journal

"Seamlessly written, sedate and subtle and so pleasurable, and quite enrapturing on a psychological level….This book opens space for a new kind of precision and intelligence that gives the amoral opulence of desire its rightful place." Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy and We Were Young

"I was completely absorbed by this radical, daring, and bracing novel about a so-cold and yet so-intimate world where safety and pleasure can be found only in the most unlikely and unpredictable of places. It is a book of exciting, provocative complexity, and, for me, it made the human creature feel like something new." Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour

Lillian Fishman was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Jill Davis Fellow. Acts of Service is her first novel.