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Dept. of Speculation
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2014
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
From the acclaimed author of Weather comes a slim, stunning portrait of a marriage—a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vogue.com, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed

In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. “Dept. of Speculation” was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life—a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions.
When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to retrace the steps that have led them to this place, invoking everything from Kafka to the Stoics to doomed Russian cosmonauts as she analyzes what is lost and what remains. In language that shimmers with rage and longing and wit, Offill has created a brilliantly suspenseful love story—a novel to read in one sitting, even as its piercing meditations linger long after the last page.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
01/28/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780385351027
ASIN:
B00F1W0DV8
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Jenny Offill. (2014). Dept. of Speculation. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Jenny Offill. 2014. Dept. of Speculation. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Jenny Offill. Dept. of Speculation. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 16:07:58
Date Updated:
Aug 05, 2022 18:16:24
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 20:56:20
Last Metadata Change:
Sep 17, 2023 22:45:33
Last Availability Check:
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Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 28, 2024 17:14:59

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      • bioText: Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award. She is the coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of two anthologies of essays, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Her children’s books include 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore, 11 Experiments That Failed, and Sparky. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University.
      • name: Jenny Offill
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publishDate
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title
Dept. of Speculation
fullDescription
From the acclaimed author of Weather comes a slim, stunning portrait of a marriage—a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vogue.com, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed

In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. “Dept. of Speculation” was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life—a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions.
When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to retrace the steps that have led them to this place, invoking everything from Kafka to the Stoics to doomed Russian cosmonauts as she analyzes what is lost and what remains. In language that shimmers with rage and longing and wit, Offill has created a brilliantly suspenseful love story—a novel to read in one sitting, even as its piercing meditations linger long after the last page.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: The New York Times Book Review
      • content:

        "Shimmering. . . . Breathtaking. . . . Joyously demanding."

      • premium: False
      • source: The Boston Globe
      • content: "Slender, quietly smashing. . . . A book so radiant, so sparkling with sunlight and sorrow, that it almost makes a person gasp."
      • premium: False
      • source: The New Yorker
      • content: "Powerful. . . . Exquisite. . . . A novel that's wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time, and glitters with different emotional colors."
      • premium: False
      • source: Vanity Fair
      • content: "A startling feat of storytelling . . . Each line a dazzling, perfectly chiseled arrowhead aimed at your heart."
      • premium: False
      • source: Michael Cunningham
      • content: "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 1897, will you please simply believe me, and read it?"
      • premium: False
      • source: The New York Review of Books
      • content: "You can read Jenny Offill's new novel in about two hours. It's short and funny and absorbing, an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from November 25, 2013
        Popping prose and touching vignettes of marriage and motherhood fill Offill’s (Last Things) slim second book of fiction. Clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty, this book is both readable in a single sitting and far ranging in the emotions it raises. The 46 short chapters are told mostly in brief fragments and fly through the life of the nameless heroine. Her mind wanders from everyday tasks and struggles, the beginnings of her marriage, the highs and lows with her husband, the joys of having a daughter. These domestic bits are contrasted by far-flung thoughts that whirl in every direction, from space aviation and sea exploration to ancient philosophy and Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics. Anecdotes and quotes also come from all over: Einstein, Eliot, Keats, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. Often, the use of third person places the heroine at a distance, examining the macro-reality of her life, but then Offill will zoom in, giving the reader a view into her heroine’s inner life—notes, graded papers and corrected manuscripts, monologues, imagined Christmas cards and questionnaires. Offill has equal parts cleverness and erudition, but it’s her language and eye for detail that make this a must-read: “Just after she turns five my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution.... I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn’t. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him. ‘Everybody has bad thoughts,’ I tell her. ‘Just try not to act on them.’ ”

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        December 15, 2013
        Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling. If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. The story is most European, too; says the narrator, "I spent my afternoons in a city park, pretending to read Horace. At dusk, people streamed out of the Metro and into the street. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful." Well, oui. The principal character is "the wife," nameless but not faceless, who enters into a relationship and then marriage with all the brave hope attendant in the enterprise. Offill (Last Things, 1999, etc.) is fond of pointed apothegms ("Life equals structure plus activity") and reflections in the place of actual action, but as the story progresses, it's clear that events test that hope--to say nothing of hubby's refusal at first to pull down a decent salary, so the young family finds itself "running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips." Material conditions improve, but that hope gets whittled away further with the years, leading to moments worthy of a postmodern version of Diary of a Mad Housewife: "The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index." The fragmented story, true though it may be to our splintered, too busy lives, is sometimes hard to follow, and at times, the writing is precious, even if we're always pulled back into gritty reality: "I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease." There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself.

        COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        November 1, 2013

        The book's title refers to the return address used by both husband and wife on letters they wrote to each other while dating. This slim novel continually speculates on the marriage of our unnamed protagonist, through all its vagaries, including the husband's affair with a much younger woman. Everyday events are always related from the wife's point of view. She is a writing instructor at a college in New York City and is also helping to write a book for a "would-be astronaut" about space travel. As the woman moves through the phases of her eagerly anticipated marriage to an Ohio-born musician, from its beginning through motherhood and more, the reader easily empathizes with her struggles and frustrations. The narrative changes direction near the end, when our heroine attempts to keep her soul together along with her marriage and family. VERDICT This work reads very quickly, and a second read is recommended. Offill's lean prose and the addition of astute quotations prevent the text from becoming just one more story of an infidelity. The author's debut, Last Things, was a Los Angeles Times First Book Award finalist, noted by the New York Times; here, her writing is exquisitely honed and vibrant. This would be an enlightened choice for a reading group. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/13.]--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        January 1, 2014
        This is a magnetic novel about a marriage of giddy bliss and stratospheric anxiety, bedrock alliance and wrenching tectonic shifts. Offill, author of the novel Last Things (1999) and various children's books, covers this shifting terrain and its stormy weather in an exquisitely fine-tuned, journal-like account narrated by the wife, an ironic self-designation rooted in her growing fears about her marital state. She is smart if a bit drifty, imaginative and selectively observant, and so precisely articulate that her perfect, simple sentences vibrate like violin strings. And she is mordantly funny, a wry taxonomist of emotions and relationships. Her dispatches from the fog of new motherhood are hilarious and subversive. Her cynical pursuit of self-improvement is painfully accurate. Her Richter-scale analysis of the aftershocks of infidelity is gripping. Nothing depicted in this portrait of a family in quiet disarray is unfamiliar in life or in literature, and that is the artistic magic of Offill's stunning performance. She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope slide and magnified it until it fills the mind's eye and the heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

popularity
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shortDescription
From the acclaimed author of Weather comes a slim, stunning portrait of a marriage—a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vogue.com, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed

In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. “Dept. of Speculation” was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life—a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions.
When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to...
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      • source: The New York Times
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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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      • description: Fiction / Family Life / General