Dept. Of Speculation
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Dept. Of Speculation
''Dept. of Speculation'' is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. The novel received positive reviews, and has been compared to Offill's later work, ''Weather''. Composition and writing Though not purely autobiographical, the novel draws from Offill's life. Offill has said ''Dept. of Speculation'' " ..came from the ashes of another book". ''Dept. of Speculation'' eschews a typical plot, which Offill has said was deliberate. Reception Critical reception According to literary review aggregator '' Book Marks'', the book received mostly "Rave" and reviews, with some less positive reception. The novel has been compared to Renata Adler's 1976 book '' Speedboat''. In her review of the book, published by NPR, Meg Wolitzer praised the novel as " ..intriguing, beautifully written, sly and often profound". Wolitzer also praised the novel's humor. Offill has said she did not anticipate the book's success. Honors ''Dept. of Speculation'' was shortlisted for 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award ...
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Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill (born 1968) is an American novelist and editor. Her novel ''Dept. of Speculation'' was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by ''The New York Times Book Review''. Early life Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers. She spent her childhood years in various American states, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina, where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: waitress, bartender, caterer, cashier, medical transcriber, fact-checker, and ghost-writer. "I went to UNC-Chapel Hill as an undergraduate and I studied with Doris Betts, Jill McCorkle and Robert Kirkpatrick among others. All three were great mentors to me as a young writer. Later, I got a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. My big influence there was Gilbert Sorrentino..."—J ...
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United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ...
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Alfred A
Alfred may refer to: Arts and entertainment *''Alfred J. Kwak'', Dutch-German-Japanese anime television series * ''Alfred'' (Arne opera), a 1740 masque by Thomas Arne * ''Alfred'' (Dvořák), an 1870 opera by Antonín Dvořák *"Alfred (Interlude)" and "Alfred (Outro)", songs by Eminem from the 2020 album ''Music to Be Murdered By'' Business and organisations * Alfred, a radio station in Shaftesbury, England *Alfred Music, an American music publisher *Alfred University, New York, U.S. *The Alfred Hospital, a hospital in Melbourne, Australia People * Alfred (name) includes a list of people and fictional characters called Alfred * Alfred the Great (848/49 – 899), or Alfred I, a king of the West Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons Places Antarctica * Mount Alfred (Antarctica) Australia * Alfredtown, New South Wales * County of Alfred, South Australia Canada * Alfred and Plantagenet, Ontario * Alfred Island, Nunavut * Mount Alfred, British Columbia United States * Alfred, Maine ...
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Weather (novel)
''Weather'' is a 2020 novel by American writer Jenny Offill. The novel is narrated by a college librarian, Lizzie. The book takes place before and after Donald Trump becomes president of the United States and depicts Lizzie's family life and her concerns about climate change. The novel received mostly positive reviews, with favorable comparisons to Offill's previous novel, '' Dept. of Speculation'' and praise for its structure. Composition and writing Offill worked on ''Weather'' for around seven years. The novel grew out of conversations between Offill and novelist Lydia Millet concerning the potential impacts of climate change. A ''New York Times'' article about Paul Kingsnorth further inspired both the novel and Offill's interest in the climate. Before Offill settled on the title ''Weather'', the book had two earlier titles: ''Learning to Die'' and, later, ''American Weather''. Offill changed the title from ''American Weather'' to ''Weather'' in part to avoid participating in a ...
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Literary Hub
Literary Hub is a daily literary website that launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin, American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame editor Terry McDonell, and Electric Literature founder Andy Hunter. Content Focused on literary fiction and nonfiction, ''Literary Hub'' publishes personal and critical essays, interviews, and book excerpts from over 100 partners, including independent presses (New Directions Publishing, Graywolf Press), large publishers (Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf), bookstores (Book People, Politics and Prose), non-profits (PEN America), and literary magazines (''The Paris Review'', n+1). The mission of ''Literary Hub'' is to be the "site readers can rely on for smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books." The website has been featured in ''The Washington Post'', ''The Guardian'', and ''Poets & Writers''. In 2019, Literary Hub launched their new blog, ''The Hub'', alongside LitHub Radio, a "network of b ...
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Renata Adler
Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938) is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for ''The New Yorker'', and in 1968–69, she served as chief film critic for ''The New York Times''. She is also a writer of fiction. Early life Adler was born in Milan, Italy, to Frederick L. and Erna Adler while they were traveling from Germany to the United States. She has two older brothers. Her family had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and moved to the U.S. in 1939. She grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After earning her B.A. ('' summa cum laude'') in philosophy and German literature from Bryn Mawr College, where she studied under José Ferrater Mora, Adler studied for an M.A. in comparative literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson. She then pursued her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later received a J.D. from Yale Law School and an h ...
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Speedboat (novel)
''Speedboat'' is a 1976 modernist novel by Renata Adler that offers a fragmentary account of the experiences of Jen Fain, a young journalist living in New York City. Publication history Prior to ''Speedboat'', Adler was largely known for her nonfiction reportage in ''The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...'', and while ''Speedboat'' is billed as a novel it includes actual incidents and autobiographical elements; as Adler once remarked, "Some of it was real." When the book was published in 1976, the 39-year-old Adler had temporarily left writing to become a first-year student at Yale Law School. "I guess I didn’t know what was going to happen when ''Speedboat'' came out", she later said. "I thought, I better be in law school, because who knows whether a ...
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PEN/Faulkner Award For Fiction
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year's best works of fiction by living American citizens. The winner receives US$15,000 and each of four runners-up receives US$5000. Finalists read from their works at the presentation ceremony in the Great Hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The organization claims it to be "the largest peer-juried award in the country." The award was first given in 1981. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is an outgrowth of William Faulkner's use of his 1949 Nobel Prize winnings to create the William Faulkner Foundation; among the charitable goals of the foundation was "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers." The foundation's first award for a "notable first novel," called the William Faulkner Foundation Award, was granted to John Knowles's ''A Separate Peace'' in 1961. The foundation was dissolved after 1970. Mary Lee Settle was one of the ...
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Folio Prize
The Rathbones Folio Prize, previously known as the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017 the sponsor is Rathbone Investment Management. Folio Prize The prize came into being after a group in Britain "took umbrage at the direction they saw the Booker Prize taking – they saw it leaning toward popular fiction rather than literary fiction." The media compared the prize as a rival of the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood said the Folio Prize is "much needed in a world in which money is increasingly becoming the measure of all things." Mark Haddon said it was "not a mechanism for generating publicity by propelling a single book into the spotlight but a celebration of literary fiction as a whole." The co-founders are Andrew Kidd and Kate Harvey. The Folio Prize during the first two years was presented to an English-language book of fiction publishe ...
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New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital media, digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as ''The Daily (podcast), The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones (publisher), George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times, 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked List of newspapers by circulation, 18th in the world by circulation and List of newspapers in the United States, 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is Public company, publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 189 ...
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Nightbitch
''Nightbitch'' is a 2021 novel by American writer Rachel Yoder. The book is a magical realism style story of a stay-at-home mom who sometimes transforms into a dog. Writing and composition Yoder had not written for two years when she began writing ''Nightbitch''. She wrote it in part due to the anger she felt after becoming a mother and the resultant changes to her personal and professional life. She was further inspired by a passage in Jenny Offill's novel '' Dept. of Speculation''. Yoder wrote the novel free of concerns about its strangeness, as she wrote it "for herself". Though, she did have concerns that the book's premise would not provide enough substance for a book of the length she wanted to write. Critical reception The novel received positive reviews. In a review for ''The Seattle Times'', Jordan Snowden praised the novel as " ..a stunning modern feminist fable that shouldn’t be missed". In her review of the book for ''The Guardian'', Lara Feigel referred it as "an i ...
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2014 American Novels
Fourteen or 14 may refer to: * 14 (number), the natural number following 13 and preceding 15 * one of the years 14 BC, AD 14, 1914, 2014 Music * 14th (band), a British electronic music duo * ''14'' (David Garrett album), 2013 *''14'', an unreleased album by Charli XCX * "14" (song), 2007, from ''Courage'' by Paula Cole Other uses * ''Fourteen'' (film), a 2019 American film directed by Dan Sallitt * ''Fourteen'' (play), a 1919 play by Alice Gerstenberg * ''Fourteen'' (manga), a 1990 manga series by Kazuo Umezu * ''14'' (novel), a 2013 science fiction novel by Peter Clines * ''The 14'', a 1973 British drama film directed by David Hemmings * Fourteen, West Virginia, United States, an unincorporated community * Lot Fourteen, redevelopment site in Adelaide, South Australia, previously occupied by the Royal Adelaide Hospital * "The Fourteen", a nickname for NASA Astronaut Group 3 * Fourteen Words, a phrase used by white supremacists and Nazis See also * 1/4 (other) * Fo ...
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