Reading List
Jenny Offill
American Novelist and Editor
Jenny Offill, born in 1968, is an American novelist and editor. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and her third novel, Weather, was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Her picks here, from a Year in Reading essay for The Millions, include Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear, Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, Michael Earl Craig’s Talkativeness and Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8.
Barn 8
by Deb Olin Unferth · 2020 · Fiction
“Deb Olin Unferth's Barn 8 isn't out until March but it's fantastic and strange. The plot concerns a plan to steal a million chickens so it basically couldn't be more interesting.” — via Article, December 2019
Divide Me by Zero
by Lara Vapnyar · 2020 · Fiction
“Lara Vapnyar's Divide Me by Zero was another delight. An incredibly inventive and insightful novel about a Russian-American woman whose life falls apart slowly and then all at once.” — via Article, December 2019
Talkativeness
by Michael Earl Craig · 2014 · Literature
“I was thrilled to come across Michael Earl Craig's Talkativeness. His poems are beautiful and beautifully deadpan. I keep returning to them.” — via Article, December 2019
Winners Take All
The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas · 2019 · Economics
“Giridharadas has the seemingly impossible ability to turn the analysis of complicated systems into a fascinating page-turner.” — via Article, December 2019
How to Disappear
Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency
by Akiko Busch · 2019 · Essays
“I loved Akiko Busch's brilliant Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. It suggests with gentle grace and sly wit the virtues of being inconspicuous, unseen, or unheralded in this over-documented age.” — via Article, December 2019
